I'm here for this whole discussion. I wish I had more time to participate.
We're sorta scratching at the point I always come back to in a "Top five <whatever>" list when you're evaluating a complex system. There are a LOT of really influential players and people over the last 75+ years.
The "Jordan might not have been THAT influential" discussion is a funny one to a kid who grew up in the 90s. But I do think there's a really captivating paradox at work with him:
- All of us tried to play like him growing up. The whole league tried to play like he did by the late 90s.
- We were all bad at it. That immediate post-Jordan (Bulls) period of slow-paced iso-ball starring a bunch of cover band Mike's was the least memorable 5 years of NBA basketball of my lifetime, in the aggregate.
The paradox? Jordan was arguably the most thoroughly dominant player in basketball history, depending on how you feel about the strength of fields Russell faced. And he dominated while playing a style that we would consider deeply flawed, analytically, today. Which "the kids" (everyone under 36) use to sometimes dismiss his ability to still dominate if he arrived on scene today, based on the flawed notion that "the best strategy for most people most of the time" is also "always better than any other strategy."
But to me, it's more impressive to destroy worlds while doing something that literally no one else can do. His shot charts from 1995-1998 are preposterous. James Harden's analytically-polished game has never stayed quite as unguardable all the way through a postseason. But a guy who can take the 15-footer and make it completely unguardable, reliable, and lethal is pretty much unstoppable, especially when he's one of the craftiest finishers on earth.
He set basketball strategy back 15 years by taking a really bad strategy for most people, and turning it into a strategy not only unstoppable in his hands, but also influencing all his competitors to keep trying to do something impossible. That's AMAZING. But I might concede that his long-term influence isn't QUITE as sky high as some other names, because we've mostly finally figured out that he was the only person who could do what he did.
There are four clear guys who I think we must name before we name anyone else when talking about greatest players ever. Going through them:
- Jordan - The Greatest, but most people should not try to play the way he did because it doesn't work in less-skilled hands.
- Kareem - The scariest single weapon in history, but it seems like maybe nobody else can quite master it? How the hell else do we explain that a move that literally cannot be stopped has also never been replicated?
- Russell - Taught us all EXACTLY how a big man should play, and it took us 50 years and about 17,232,497 failed Dwight Howard post-ups before we accepted it. So far ahead of his time it's ridiculous.
- Lebron - I think, like Russell, he's teaching us EXACTLY what you want out of a lead ball handler. There's a lot about Lebron's game that I could never have replicated. But the part where he reads and facilitates and bends and breaks defenses is exactly what we should all aspire to, at least.
What's all this have to do with golf? Well, somehow the most athletic game on earth makes more room for different styles and skillsets than a game famously historically dominated by fat white guys does, at least in 2021. That seems like a real failure on golf's part.