With half our list gone, we’re getting into the realm of the all-timers, athletes who can genuinely claim to be legends in their respective sports—including three lefties, two California natives and one middle-aged man known for yelling “Omaha!” The margins are getting smaller. If you flip-flopped No. 20 with No. 11, I might say you’re wrong, but I wouldn’t call you crazy.
If you missed the previous twenty names in the rankings, check out Part I and Part II. Here we go:
20. Peyton Manning
So far, this is perhaps the biggest departure in these rankings from popular opinion. Isn’t Manning the greatest quarterback of all time? Shouldn’t he be in the top five, top ten at minimum?
The stats are all there—the yards, the touchdowns, the crazy completion percentage. Between 1999 and 2014, Manning’s worst single-season totals in those categories were 3,739 yards, 26 touchdowns and a 62.1% completion rate. That would be a fantastic season for 95% of quarterbacks in NFL history. He was the most important player on some of the sport’s best offenses of all time. No football player has used his brain to greater effect. Manning’s also a five-time MVP and a two-time Super Bowl champion.
There aren’t a lot of holes to poke here. At this point of the list, everyone’s great. We’re picking nits.
But when I think Peyton Manning—before I think of all the yards, all the touchdowns, even those two Super Bowls—I think of what Bill Simmons once so memorably dubbed the Manning Face. That flustered, frustrated, pursed-lip expression that graced his mug whenever Peyton threw an interception or failed to convert a crucial third down or otherwise wilted in the clutch. It seemed to crop up all too much.
There’s the losing record in the playoffs, including a 2-5 career mark when his team was playing at home in the divisional round. There were the two interceptions in an upset loss to San Diego in the 2007 playoffs, two more picks in a 2012 postseason defeat to Baltimore, the complete Denver disaster that was Super Bowl XLVIII against Seattle.
There was plenty of greatness, too. But for me, not enough to move Manning any higher.
Recommended reading: Peyton Manning Had a Hall of Fame Career. Then He Had Another One, by Neil Paine
19. Marta
Compared to most sports, top-level women’s soccer on the international level is brand new. The United States women’s national team—to pick one example—wasn’t formed until 1985, and the first Women’s World Cup wasn’t contested until 1991.
But that doesn’t make it any less impressive to say Marta has a very healthy case to be called the greatest player in the history of the game. Where to start? With 15 goals, she’s the all-time leading scorer at the Women’s World Cup. With five FIFA World Player of the Year awards to her name, she’s the most decorated women’s player of all time. The only real hole in her resume is the lack of a World Cup title. But as we’ll see with a couple other names higher up this list, that’s far from a disqualifying factor.
While in some ways she represents the start of a new women’s soccer tradition in Brazil, in other ways Marta taps into the sports illustrious history in her home country. Fearless with the ball at her feet, equally adept at creating space and shots for herself or setting the table for her teammates, she fits squarely in line with Brazil’s history of skilled playmakers. Part of the spirit of South American soccer is style, trickery, the ability to embarrass defenders. Marta possesses that ability in spades.
Pelé himself dubbed Marta “Pelé in skirts.” Which seems slightly wrong-headed, considering she plays in the same uniform he did, but it’s a fair expression of Marta’s status as a living legend.
Recommended reading: The Greatness of Marta in a Still-Sexist Game, by Joshua Law
18. Kobe Bryant
There’s nobody in the NBA over the past eighteen years who was more fun to watch score, who made such difficult shots look so easy. Kobe could do just about everything, when he put his mind to it, but he was preternaturally gifted at putting the ball in the basket. He could do it from just about anywhere, in just about any way. His 2006 regular season, when Bryant averaged a whopping 35.6 points per game, was … a lot of things. One of those things, though, was the most impressive months-long display of bucket-getting in my lifetime. Scoring is probably the most important single skill in basketball, and Kobe was the best at it.
But scoring is not the only skill in basketball. And while Bryant was clearly a wonderful player in many ways, that fact is why he’s the third-ranked player from the NBA on this list and not any higher.
More so than baseball or golf or tennis or swimming or just about any other sport on this list, basketball is a team game. Would you have wanted to play with Kobe Bryant? Did it seem fun? Did he make his teammates better? One could point to the five championships he won with the Lakers as proof Bryant wasn’t a detriment to winning. Shouldn’t that be all that matters? Which, fine. Sure. But I can’t help but think that if Kobe shared a few more personality traits with the two NBA players ranked above him, he might have a couple rings for the other hand, too.
That’s enough of all that, though. Bryant wasn’t perfect, but often, he was pretty close to it—the immaculate footwork, the emphatic blocked shots, the ability to score and score and score no matter who was in his way. The fact that there was always a sneer waiting for the defender once he did.
That he only won one MVP seems like a typo—as does the fact that he was named all-NBA on eighteen different occasions. But that’s Kobe. Overlooked by some, overworshipped by others, a scoring savant who didn’t care either way as long as it all ended with another piece of diamond-studded jewelry on his finger.
Recommended reading: The Fourth Quarter, by Ben McGrath
17. Venus Williams
Her sister has long since engulfed the sport, but for a year or two after the turn of the millennium, it appeared Venus Williams was well on her way to being the greatest women’s tennis player of all time. Serena’s ascent, injuries, a serious health scare and other factors intervened. But we’re still left with a seven-time major champion (plus fourteen major doubles titles) who’s been atop the sport for just about two decades now, a player whose power game helped transform women’s tennis—not to mention one of the most meaningful sporting pioneers of our era.
The most blunt-force example of Venus (and Serena)’s impact was at last month’s U.S. Open, when 24-year-old American Sloane Stephens defeated 22-year-old countrywoman Madison Keys in the final, after Stephens first upended Venus in three sets in the semis to get there. It was the first major final of all time contested between two African-American women whose last names weren’t Williams. Venus was also at the fore of the fight to achieve equal prize money for men’s and women’s players in 2005 and 2006, and she’s built a minor business empire without slipping on the court. Venus helped change what’s possible for black women in tennis, for women in sports, and for athletes as citizens of the wider world.
But we mentioned all those wins, right? Venus is one of the most talented players ever, a one-time phenom who’s embarked on a career resurgence this year, reaching two major finals and another semifinal at 37, twenty-three years after first turning pro. Once a powerhouse, she now gets by a bit more on guile. While doing the same thing to to her sport, Venus has transformed herself.
Recommended reading: Venus and Serena Against the World, by John Jeremiah Sullivan
16. Clayton Kershaw
In the top of the fourth inning in a spring training game on March 9, 2008, with a 1-2 count and two outs, Clayton Kershaw rocked and delivered an unholy curveball to Boston’s Sean Casey. The pitch started at Casey’s head; the veteran first baseman flinched. It wound up snapping across the inside corner and into the glove for strike three. Casey looked at Kershaw as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Oh, what a curveball!” said Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, who would know. “Holy mackerel. He just broke off Public Enemy No. 1.” And a legend was born.
Kershaw debuted that same season with Los Angeles as a 2o-year-old. Soon after, in 2011, he began the greatest seven-year stretch (and counting) since at least peak Pedro Martinez. Since then, Kershaw has won an MVP and three Cy Young awards. He’s finished with an ERA below 2.00 on three separate occasions. He struck out 300 batters in 2015. The next year, he logged a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 15.64, the best single-season figure in baseball history by an outrageously large margin. He led all of MLB in ERA four times and came six-hundredths of a point from doing it again 2017. And by some measures, the southpaw is only getting better: After never posting a double-digit K/9 rate in his first six seasons, Kershaw has accomplished the feat in every campaign since.
Fourteen times in the past 44 years a starting pitcher has posted an ERA below 2.00, and more than 20% of the time it was Kershaw. He has not yet turned 30.
And while Kershaw is clearly a multi-faceted pitcher with many weapons, by far the most beautiful one in his arsenal has been that curveball, Public Enemy No. 1. That thing is a heartbreaker, and its author a badass. Kershaw will snap one off a particularly nasty one for strike three and then walk off the mound with that same blank expression he always has, as if he didn’t just completely embarrass another professional who is paid millions of dollars to not be embarrassed by such pitches.
What Mariano Rivera is for relievers, Clayton Kershaw is for starters. And again, he’s just 29. When it’s all said and done, the lefty just might go down as the greatest pitcher in baseball history.
Recommended reading: Is this the year Clayton Kershaw finally ends the Kershaw-Koufax debate?, by Bradford Doolittle
15. Tom Brady
Brady is the greatest postseason quarterback of all time, and it’s not particularly close. His numbers stack up with just about anybody’s when it comes to the regular season, too. He’s got the five Super Bowls. He’s got the (almost) mythical 2007 season, when he led the league in every relevant passing category and (almost) led the Patriots to a perfect season. And somehow, at 40, he’s still doing it. Brady’s been one of the very best players in the sport for just about every year of the millennium.
He can make every throw and can spin a beautiful ball. Like just about every great quarterback, though, his success is due to a lot more than physical skill. When it comes to making the right decision every single time, only Peyton Manning can claim to be Brady’s equal. At this point, Brady’s brain seems to be a database of every situation he’s ever seen on a football field, and he’s quite good at pulling the necessary info at the right time.
(While we’re talking about brains, an aside: Please don’t try to play until you’re 45, Tom.)
And while very good arguments exist for why Brady is one of the three or five or ten best athletes of the past two decades, I can’t in good conscious put him any higher on this list. We don’t think of quarterbacks the same way as, say, pitchers, but in some ways it’s an apt comparison: both are specialists. Brady only does one thing on the football field. He can’t run or catch or tackle, and it looks awfully awkward when he tries. That one thing is very important, and he does it extremely well. But when we’re stratifying the absolute creme de la creme, those miniscule margins matter.
Someone like, say, LeBron James—or the next name on this list—has an enormous impact on every single facet of his sport. Brady is one cog of fifty-three. That’s why analysts say football is the ultimate team game, and it’s no knock on Brady. Again: the most important cog! It’s just a fact that explains why Touchdown Tom isn’t as high on this list as you may have thought.
Recommended reading: Tom Brady Talks to Chuck Klosterman about Deflategate (Sort of…), by Chuck Klosterman
14. Annika Sörenstam
Already, with her peak more than a decade in the past and a new generation of stars emerging, Sörenstam is fading into memory. But what a peak it was.
Between 1997 and 2008 she was one of the world’s most dominant athletes in any sport, winning LPGA Tour player of the year and finishing atop the money list seven times each, including five straight years from 2001 to 2005. Sörenstam won 72 times on tour, third-most in history and 50% more victories than any other player who began her career in the past fifty years. Her ten major titles are tied for fourth all-time.
It’s pretty unassailable that she’s the best female golfer in the era of modern equipment, and she’s on a very short list of the greatest players in history. One of the only knocks on her is a relative lack of longevity. If Sörenstam had even one or two more years of such stellar results on her résumé, the Swede would be ranked even higher.
Sörenstam is also responsible for a couple of the cooler moments in recent golfing memory. In 2001, she shot 59 during the second round of a tournament in Phoenix, becoming the first woman in history to break 60 in a tour event. She’s still the only player to accomplish the feat. Two years later, in 2003, Sörenstam made more history when she became the first woman to play in a PGA Tour event since the end of World War II. She shot one-over on Thursday, hitting more fairways than anyone in the field and putting herself in position to make the cut, before going four-over on Friday. But she still beat fifteen men, a fact I doubt they mention too often.
Recommended reading: A Woman Among Men, by Michael Bamberger
13. Barry Bonds
I once wrote a fuller defense of the greatness of Barry Lamar Bonds, which still applies, so I’ll keep this relatively brief. He was the greatest baseball player I’ve ever seen, and the only reason he’s not even higher on this list is that only about 25% of his career occurred during the current millennium. While he played until 2007, Bonds’s last truly transcendent season occurred in 2004.
From 2000 to 2004, though, whoo boy—transcendent is the right word. Bonds did things no one before him ever has, and I’m skeptical anyone else ever will do them again. For those five years, if you threw Bonds a strike, there was a pretty decent chance it was going to leave the yard. He turned baseball into a carnival of wonder, the epitome of the steroid era.
Yeah, he took steroids. Probably nothing that was illegal at the time, but still. You knock the guy a bit for that. And yet: a large number of other baseball players have taken steroids, and none have come close to what Bonds accomplished. Steroids don’t help you make perfect contact with an 88 mile-an-hour slider diving at your knees. He’s kind of a cheater, he was definitely a jerk, but my god could the man hit a baseball.
Recommended reading: Baseball Without Metaphor, by David Grann
12. Rafael Nadal
Televised tennis can be sterile. Nadal has a knack for making it pop. With the muscles, the hair, the headbands, the tank tops—few players have ever been so physically imposing. Perhaps even fewer have approached the game with such ferocity. On the court, the swaggering Spaniard seems to be everywhere at once, a never-ending whirlwind of movement and spin and sweat—which goes a long way toward explaining his dominance on clay courts, the slowest surfaces in tennis, where longer rallies tend to be more common. No one can outlast him.
And even today, twelve years after winning his first Grand Slam, Nadal just keeps going. The US Open title he won last month was his sixteenth major, the second-most of any man in history. It was Nadal’s second major title of the year, the fourth year in which he’s won more than one. With ten championships at the French Open, he’s the only male player in history to hit double digits in titles at any major.
And while the stereotype is that Nadal is something of a clay specialist, he’d still be one of the all-time greats if every match he’d ever played was on grass or hard courts. He’s one of just two players to win multiple majors on all three surfaces, and he’s won 74 total times on tour, fifth-most in history.
All those numbers are nice, but they can’t capture the overpowering way in which he’s racked them up, the way his physical tools and peerless technique have allowed Nadal to railroad more than a decade’s worth of competition. Here are some stats that might: A tennis researcher named John Yandell once used high-speed cameras to track the amount of spin imparted on the ball by different players. Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, the two greatest players of the 1990s, rarely topped 2,000 rotations per minute. Roger Federer can get into the 2,700 range. One Nadal shot, meanwhile, Yandell observed spinning at 4,900 revolutions per minute, and the Spaniard’s average offering was around 3,200.
Nadal is the second-greatest tennis player in history. And if he somehow continue’s this year’s late-career renaissance, he may end up No. 1.
Recommended reading: The King, But For How Much Longer? Rafa Nadal on the Eve of the French Open, by Brian Phillips
11. Allyson Felix
With fifteen years of top-level performance and six Olympic gold medals to her name, Felix may be the greatest women’s sprinter of all time. Others have been faster at their peaks, but in terms of versatility and longevity, the California native is unequaled.
At the level of world-class competition, the vast majority of track-and-field athletes are specialists. They might run the 100 meters, or the 1,600, or they might throw the javelin, but hardly ever a combination thereof. Then there’s Felix, who’s won Olympic gold and multiple world championships running three different distances: By herself in the 200 and 400 and as part of the US relay team in the 100, 200 and 400.
And while there’s certainly some medal-padding to be found in all those relays, Felix’s talents are legit. In 2012, she ran the eighth-fastest time in history for the 200 (21.69 seconds), and three years later she ran the third-fastest split in history during a 4×400 relay (47.72), trailing only two women from the former Soviet bloc whose times were almost surely chemically aided. Similar suspicious surround Florence Griffith-Joyner, Felix’s primary competition for the title of Greatest U.S. Sprinter Ever. And while just about every track athlete is the subject of some steroid rumors, there seem to be very few doubts that Felix is clean.
Equally as impressive as the times she’s recorded is the length of time Felix has been able to sustain them. In 2005, she became the youngest woman to ever win a world title in a sprint with a victory in the 200. Ten years later, in 2015, she won a world championship in the 400. Felix has medaled at four different Olympics; for comparison’s sake, Flo-Jo and Gail Devers each sprinted at only two Olympics, while Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce has finished on the podium at three separate games. An entire generation of sprinters has come and gone, and Felix remains at the pinnacle of her sport.
Recommended reading: In this race, Allyson Felix is ahead of them all, by Erit Yellen
Check back soon for Part IV