In Debates about the GOAT -- It's Always Jim Thorpe

Chuck Klosterman -- a favorite GenX music and pop culture writer -- has done it: he has written the perfect summation of what I have thought, said, asserted, and argued for many years when people talk about greatness in sports. In any discussion of "the GOAT," the answer is always Jim Thorpe.

Klosterman, in a superb piece of commentary for the New York Times, focuses specifically on the NFL and the game of football as he asserts: "Tom Brady Is Not the GOAT ".  That headline alone is designed to and is certain to generate immediate interest and criticism. But Klosterman is not deterred, nor should he be. While Tom Brady is almost undoubtedly the greatest NFL quarterback of all time (I do have a bit of a preference for Johnny Unitas, to be honest, but have mad respect for Brady and don't dispute his "GOAT-ness"), Jim Thorpe is untouchable as the greatest football player of all time.

To classify Tom Brady as the greatest football player of all time is among the least controversial assertions anyone can make about anything. It’s a subjective opinion accepted as objective truth: He played quarterback for 23 professional seasons, and if those 23 seasons were divided into three separate careers, all three might qualify for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and a seventh with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He is the winningest player, the man who played the longest at an elite level, and the unthinking answer to this particular debate.

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In other words, it’s the earliest incarnation of greatness still intimately related to all examples that follow. Which is why, despite so much evidence to the contrary, the greatest football player of all time is still Jim Thorpe, a Native American who retired from the game in 1928 and died when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. 

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When evaluating someone like Jim Thorpe against someone like Tom Brady, it’s not enough to estimate how much Thorpe might have benefited from modern nutrition or how much Brady might have suffered if he’d been forced to grow up in rural Oklahoma before the invention of breakfast cereal. One must also consider how those differing environments would have caused them to understand almost every aspect of the material world in totally different ways. We don’t have video footage of Thorpe running the football. Such footage does not exist. Yet we know he was the greatest ball carrier of his era, and we know this era was when football (as we still understand it) came into being. 

But, I will take Klosterman's claim one step further to its obvious conclusion: Jim Thorpe is indisputably the greatest athlete of all time. Thorpe was an early twentieth century Native American athlete who won Olympic gold medals and played professional football, baseball, and basketball. The decathlon has long been considered the track and field sport (with ten events) that determines the top overall athlete. And when Thorpe competed in 1922, he won it as well as the classic pentathlon, which is a similar event of five events.

There is no comparable accomplishments -- elite performance at the Olympics and the three major professional sports -- in modern or contemporary history. Nor will there ever be again. So, it's clear, in terms of pure athletic prowess, Jim Thorpe is the GOAT -- the greatest athlete of all time.