Welcome back to the second part of the list—or if you’re just joining in, go back and check out part one, featuring young guns like Mike Trout and Kevin Durant and more elderly specialists like Mariano Rivera and pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva. Yeah, a pole vaulter—we’re going deep here. Among today’s additions: A Serb, a seven-footer, and one-time sensation from Down Under.
Without further ado, here are ten more of the greatest athletes of the millennium:
30. Katinka Hosszú
Casual followers might know Katinka Hosszú best for her “Iron Lady” nickname or the creepy-or-cute? relationship she maintains with coach/husband Shane Tusup. The reason she’s on this list, those, is her wholesale dominance of one of swimming’s marquee events.
As a combination of all four strokes, one could argue the individual medley is the best test of all-around swimming skill. Hosszú’s accomplishments in the event speak for themselves. Swimmers compete in five different varieties of the IM—the 100 and 200 meters in both 25m and 50m pools, plus the 400 meters—and Hosszú owns the world record in all five.
In the past five years, the 100 and 200 IM have been contested fourteen times at either the European Championships, the World Championships or the Olympics. Hosszú has won all fourteen races. She won three golds and a silver at the Rio Games, dominating the medleys and adding gold in the 100 backstroke and silver in the 200 backstroke. For her efforts, she was named swimmer of the year by FINA in 2014, 2015, and 2016.
Earlier this summer, Hosszú (who’s earned more money than any other female pro swimmer in history) helped launch a swimmers’ union, which earns her bonus points in my book.
Of note is that Hosszú didn’t ascend to her current world-record-breaking stratosphere until 23 or 24 years of age, much later than the emergence of your typical swimming stud—think phenoms like Missy Franklin or Michael Phelps. She attributes that (plus her legendary in-meet endurance) in large part to coaching; others have suggested more nefarious causes. As far as tailed tests, however, there’s no concrete reason for suspicion.
And so we’re left with a dominant force in a diverse, physically taxing event, a swimmer who’s made her reputation by working and training harder than all her competitors in a sport filled with athletes who work and train very, very hard.
Recommended reading: Katinka Hosszu and Her Husband Raise Eyebrows at the Pool, by Karen Crouse
29. Sidney Crosby
More than any other sport, I think, a great individual play in hockey is akin to magic. It involves sleight of hand. It involves deception. It involves fooling people who are focused on making sure you don’t fool them. It involves manipulating an object your audience can’t always see. It’s a dance, an art form, a mix of choreography and improvisation that, at its best, requires a certain degree of genius.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that Sidney Crosby is a wizard.
He’s not the biggest player. He’s not the fastest. But he may very well be the most skilled, and it’s a whole lot of fun to watch him embarrass professional defenders.
In terms of pure goal-scoring, Crosby lags a bit behind Alexander Ovechkin, the player against whom he will always be compared. Only once has Crosby scored 50 goals, while Ovechkin has hit that mark on six occasions. But Crosby is far superior when it comes to playmaking and creating opportunities for others. The Penguins center forward has topped 100 points in five of his eight relatively full seasons. Ovechkin has done so only four times in eleven tries.
Those stats are obviously a simplification, but they seem to effectively illustrated the players’ respective strengths. And in hockey, as in basketball or soccer, playmaking plus scoring trumps scoring alone.
And while championships are never the be-all, end-all in a conversation about who’s better, the fact that Crosby’s Penguins have won three Stanley Cups during his career has to count for something.
Recommended reading: The Crosby Conundrum: Entering middle age, who is Sid the Kid?, by Michael Farber
28. Albert Pujols
For the first decade of this millennium, Pujols appeared destined to become the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. The numbers were staggering. Every year in St. Louis, it seemed, Pujols batted .330 with 40 home runs and 120 RBI. He’d wait at the plate in his trademark crouch, glowering from behind his trademark goatee, and lash line drive after line drive onto the outfield grass.
Then Pujols turned thirty. The numbers have still been decent, and some seasons have been better than others, but Pujols has been a completely different player since joining the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim, or whatever). He hasn’t hit .300 for six seasons now, and he’s never finished higher than seventeenth in the MVP balloting in the American League.
In tandem with current teammate Mike Trout, Pujols presents an interesting test case in how to judge performance over a two-decade period. What matters more, a player’s peak or a full body of work? How should we assess athletes still in their mid-20s on pace for transcendent careers—can we assume they’ll keep it up?
This is perhaps too low for Pujols, but it’s undeniable that the shine has come off. While Pujols is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, after his past six ho-hum seasons, it’s difficult to think of him in quite the same way.
Recommended reading: Albert Pujols and the Plight of Latino Baseball Players, by Alan Barra
27. Diana Taurasi
From her stellar college career at Connecticut to her four Olympic gold medals to her new status as the all-time leading scorer in WNBA history, Taurasi has dominated women’s basketball for much of the past two decades. While scoring’s her specialty, the 6-foot guard can do a little bit of everything, with career averages of 4.3 assists and 4.0 rebounds per night to go with her 19.9 points per game.
Her finest single campaign was in 2008, when Taurasi won MVP after averaging 24.1 points, 5.1 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 1.4 assists and 1.4 blocks per game. Just for comparison’s sake, the only NBA players to ever post such a single-season line: Michael Jordan, David Robinson, Kevin Garnett, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving, and Chris Webber, according to Basketball Reference. And Taurasi did it in 40-minute games, not 48.
All in all, Taurasi’s résumé is impeccable. She’s also a three-time WNBA champion, a former winner of both MVP and Rookie of the Year, and she’s been named female player of the year by USA Basketball on four occasions.
What people who watched Taurasi play will remember most, though, is her swagger. Her panache. Her screw-you-I’m-the-best attitude. The trash talk, the behind-the-back passes, the mid-range shots from insane angles that always seem to find the bottom of the net. The personality that made one of her former general managers say that Taurasi “will rip your jugular out on the court.”
Taurasi’s verve is exactly what women’s basketball needs to broaden its mainstream reach. It may be a while before the sport sees another player with Taurasi’s skills, but here’s hoping her style begins to crop up more and more in the next generation.
Recommended reading: Be Like Dee, by Kevin Conley
26. Shaquille O’Neal
When has there ever been an athlete like Shaquille O’Neal? A seven-footer who was built like a freezer-refrigerator combo yet could still hold his own dancing with the Jabbawockeez? If he played football, O’Neal could have been the greatest offensive tackle of all time. If he’d spent as much time working on his craft as, say, Kobe Bryant, he might well be remembered as the greatest basketball player in history.
But when it came to fame, O’Neal always liked to have his cake and eat it, too. Which is totally fine. It just means he settles in a bit lower on this list than would have otherwise been possible.
Most memories of O’Neal center on his brute force, his overwhelming physical dominance, his ability to demoralize opponents with quickness and girth and nasty glares. Vince Carter, Michael Jordan and Julius Erving might get mentioned first in a conversation about NBA history’s great dunkers, but for my money, never has there been a more impactful in-game dunker than Shaq. For evidence, see the above video.
That’s a fact that makes it easy to overlook the other aspects of his game. Shaq was much more than power. Shaq had moves. Shaq had grace. Unless he was at the free throw line, Shaq could score just about any way he wanted.
If O’Neal had played the entirety of his career in the current millennium, he’s be higher up this list. Many of his finest pro seasons fall outside our scope. He averaged more than 25 points per game on ten separate occasions during his nineteen pro seasons, and six of those occurred during the 1990s—including the 1994 and 1995 seasons, in which he helped lead the Orlando Magic to consecutive appearances in the NBA Finals.
All that being said: O’Neal’s decade from 2000 to 2009 is still one of the best stretches for a big man in the history of basketball, including four championships, one MVP, and seven appearances on the all-NBA first team. Even during the last year of that run, at the age of 36, O’Neal posted 17.8 points and 8.4 rebounds for Phoenix—far from the early demise that many predicted for a very large man who often seemed so opposed to staying in peak shape. That never seemed to matter. Shaq was a freak to the end.
Recommended reading: Generation Shaq: Catching up with the kids named after a larger-than-life NBA superstar, by Alex Prewitt
25. Novak Djokovic
Djokovic has won twelve majors, including the career Grand Slam, and has spent more than two hundred weeks at number one in the world rankings. He once held all four Grand Slam singles titles at once. Djokovic owns the highest career winning percentage of any man in the open era. He plays beautiful tennis. And yet.
And yet he will always, it seems, be overshadowed by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Djokovic may very well be the third-greatest player in men’s tennis history; it just so happens that his two primary rivals are numbers one and two. I’m trying to avoid punishing him too much for that simple twist of fate. But it can’t really be helped. If he were born ten years earlier or ten years later, all those impressive numbers from the previous paragraph would be all the more staggering.
The Serb, the Swiss and the Spaniard present an interesting trichotomy. Federer has always been known for his grace, the almost ethereal nature of his play. No one looks more comfortable in the all white of Wimbledon. He seems, as David Foster Wallace so memorably put it, both flesh and not. Nadal is the opposite, the yin to Federer’s yang, a roaring whirlwind of energy and biceps and dripping sweat, alive with speed and spin.
And then there’s Djokovic—a tennis savant since childhood who’s just really, really good. Federer has his signature backhand slice. Nadal has his churning top-spin forehand. Djokovic has an A version of every shot in the bag—but perhaps no A+. Djokovic is undeniably great, a metronome of brilliance who achieved a level that few tennis player in history ever have. The fact that he isn’t ranked higher just shows how tough the competition has been.
Recommended reading: The Third Man, by Lauren Collins
24. Misty May-Treanor
We live in an era of incredible media oversaturation. That’s particularly true in sports. And yet it’s quite possible that you’ve never seen Misty May-Treanor play volleyball—or if you have, it was only as part of a cut-down twenty-minute segment to help NBC fill the air on a Tuesday night during the Summer Olympics. Her sport is largely invisible. Beach volleyball’s primary utility to the sporting press seems to be providing images of women in bikinis to be shown in slow motion during a fade to commercial.
But the nation’s ignorance of her sport doesn’t make May-Treanor any less dominant, and it shouldn’t affect her place in a consideration of the millennium’s greatest athletes. The only reason she’s not the top-ranked volleyball player on this list is because of a certain former teammate—but more on that soon.
In the early days of her career, May-Treanor was a star indoors. In 1998, she was the setter for a Long Beach State team that went undefeated and won the NCAA title, with May-Treanor earning Most Outstanding Player honors in the process. Then, she moved to the beach, playing two seasons with partner Holly McPeak, winning rookie of the year honors on tour and taking fifth at the 2000 Olympics.
Then, in 2001, May-Treanor formed a new partnership with a lanky Stanford alum named Kerri Walsh. And the sport of beach volleyball would never be the same. Over the course of the next twelve years, they became the most dominant pair in the game’s history, winning gold medals in 2004, 2008 and 2012 and at one point compiling a winning streak of 112 matches. When they lost, it was an event. During that time, May was named MVP of the beach volleyball tour on four occasions and most outstanding player by the FIVB twice.
She and Walsh (later known as Kerri Walsh Jennings) dominated their sport like few other athletes have this millennium. So why is May the lower-ranked of the two? Hold on for one or two more paragraphs here.
Recommended reading: Misty May-Treanor Leaves Behind a Special Legacy, by Mike Guardabascio
23. Kerri Walsh Jennings
Everything you can say about May-Treanor’s sparkling resume is also true of her former partner’s, and then some. After May-Treanor’s retirement in 2012, Walsh Jennings has continued to play alongside April Ross. Now, at the age of 36, she’s beach volleyball’s all-time leader in both career wins and career earnings (more than $2.5 million, if you were curious). She’s a two-time MVP on tour and a four-time winner of FIVB’s most outstanding player award. That crazy winning streak, those three Olympic golds—she’s got those too.
It’s difficult to separate the two halves that make up the whole of a beach volleyball team. Who was better, Misty or Kerri? The two simply did different things. One way to look at it, though, is that it’s a bit more difficult to find a player with Walsh-Jennings’s skill set. The idea of a versatile, defensive-minded setter who can also be a real offensive weapon—a fair description of May-Treanor—isn’t all that wild. But a 6-foot-3 middle blocker with the agility to move around the sand like Walsh Jennings can? That’s a much rarer package.
Also in Walsh Jennings’s favor for the purposes of this list: her added longevity. Considering how closely her own list of accomplishments mirrors May-Treanor’s, having an extra four years of competition under her belt this millennium provides a slight edge.
Just for fun, here’s a ranking of the top six sporting tandems of the past 18 years:
6. Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz
5. Mike Bryan and Bob Bryan
4. Lauren Jackson and Sue Bird
3. Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal
2. Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor
1. Serena Williams and Venus Williams
Recommended reading: A Line in the Sand, by Alyssa Roenick
22. Alex Rodriguez
If the only evidence for Rodriguez’s place in these rankings were the statistics detailed on his Baseball Reference page, he’d be much higher. I mean, look at those numbers. He ranks fourth in MLB history in career home runs and third in RBI, sixth in total bases and first in grand slams. For ten years, he played excellent defense at a premium position. He’s a three-time MVP.
And while Rodriguez first emerged as a star in the 1990s, he did the bulk of that damage during our millennium of consideration. Between 2000 and 2009, for instance, here was the average Rodriguez season: a .304 batting average, 44 home runs, 124 RBI and 119 runs scored, 18 stolen bases and an OPS of more than 1.000. That’s an average! A-Rod was incredible.
Unfortunately, there are some other factors at play. Like steroids. That happened. A little chemical assistance isn’t the end of the world, but it certainly doesn’t work in Rodriguez’s historical favor.
And while you could certainly chalk this up to me being a spurned third-grader when he departed Seattle for Texas, but there’s also the overriding, inescapable feeling that everything Rodriguez did was just a little bit soulless. You don’t get the nickname A-Fraud for no reason.
Is that unfair? I don’t think so. This is a ranking of the greatest athletes of the millennium, and the word “greatest” implies something beyond on-field performance. Sports are far more than numbers on a screen.
Recommended reading: The Education of Alex Rodriguez, by J.R. Moehringer
21. Lauren Jackson
Meet the greatest women’s basketball player of the millennium. Lead the WNBA in scoring? She could do that. Lead the league in rebounding? She could do that too. Win defensive player of the year? You bet. Shoot 45% from three-point range, or 93% from the free throw line? Accomplished both. Win a WNBA title? Twice. Be named MVP? Three times. And we’re only talking about her accomplishments in America here.
Standing six-foot-five, there were times when Jackson was likely the best offensive player in the world as well as the best defensive player, both a versatile scoring dynamo and a shot-blocking anchor in the middle. Not a bad combo.
A survey of Jackson’s past two decades demonstrates the globe-trotting nature of a career in women’s basketball. A national icon in her Australian home, she’s played professionally on four continents; in addition to her WNBA successes, Jackson played for more than a decade Down Under, winning MVP four times as a member of the Canberra Capitals. In international play, meanwhile, she helped Australia to three Olympic silver medals and a bronze.
No other player in recent history can match Jackson’s versatility, extended peak and championship pedigree—and none have made a fifteen-foot turnaround feel so automatic.
Recommended reading: Bird and Jackson a winning combination, by Michelle Voepel
Check back soon for Part III