re: Who was the biggest American sport icon of the 20th century?

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I think LeBron is a bigger star than we give him credit for especially with the NBA promoting more overseas. He is probably more popular than what Ruth, Ali, and Robinson were. More people could recognize him and tell you information about him. A lot of that has to do with this age and time of players. Or are we only talking being known in America, if so then Jordan.

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Ruth played a niche sport, it was huge in the US but outside of it wasn't all that well known it's like citing a Cricket player as the biggest sports star Globally. I also think your understating Ali-- Boxing was a huge global sport and Ali was the Heavyweight champ. Plus there's all those stories of villages in Africa and kids on the streets of Manilla.

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People buy shoes regardless...People were going to buy Nike Shoes regardless.

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yeaaaaa no.

not 2.6 billion dollars worth. The Jordan Brand surpassed Nikes own basketball brand of shoes. By a large margin. You can't file that under "people buy shoes regardless".

I dont see what is so hard to understand.

Ruth
Ali
Secretariat

It comes down to star vs icon I think.


Jordan is arguably the biggest star of all time, the richest, the longest post career huge earnings but icons stand for more than just winning, Jordan quite consciously choose not to go that route on anything "Republicans buy sneakers too" and all that jazz (this isn't a partisan thing, it's more a Jordan stands for Jordan and nothing else thing)

Which leaves Ruth and Ali- Ruth represented a simplified version America to much of the country and to Japan (where he played an exhibition tour), Ali represented something more complex that's hard to define in the space of a post, but he represented it to the entire world.

That's why Ali would be #1.

I would say Ruth or Ali. Jordan is important, but Ali was known more globally and his political/social impact was far greater than Jordan. I mean Jordan didn't change the way we look at things in society but Ali did.

Ruth was the first mega superstar athlete in the US and he was famous around the world but not nearly as much as Ali or Jordan. Ruth set the template for using media like movies, radio, and print that Ali and Jordan followed on tv.

Jordan was at his peak before the internet took off.

I would say that globally it's Ali.

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but Ali was known more globally

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than Jordan??

LeBatard had a dude on today, Dave Remnick or something. He wrote a book about Ali. Maybe you can argue he was biased, I don't know enough about him to know.

But on the radio show today, he said Ali was by far the most known athlete on a global scale.

I certainly have no say in the matter, I wasn't around in the 60s to know who cared about boxing outside of the USA.

Just throwing it out there since I heard it just today.

I'll add my useless opinion on Page 5.

If we're just sticking to Americans and America, I'd say Ruth. He does get a significant boost because he came early in the 20th century.

However, I'll illustrate his icon status with the movie "The Sandlot" The Sandlot is a movie released in 1993 about kids growing up in 1962 who idolize a guy who died before any of them were born (or close to it), who himself was born in 1895.

We all related to Babe Ruth as the idol and knew he was a big deal and I was 8 at the time.

You really are not being serious are you?

Because it took 48 years until someone duplicated his feat and it was nowhere near the environment that Lewis did it on.

Carl Lewis also needs to be on any icon list. Lewis is the greatest Track athlete ever.