I root for overdogs. I root for the best ever to play the game. I want the player or team with all the records to keep capturing more records.
I don’t root for underdogs because I am not a child, and I have aged out of hope. This is a cruel world, and life is too short to invest any emotion in losers. Especially when winners abound.
I don’t care where you grew up, who your family roots for, or what school you went to. Logic exists: winners win, and that trumps your emotion-based loser bias almost every time. It’s what makes me such an excellent gambler, even though, numerically, I’m very much in the hole.
Who I consider to be the GOATS are as follows:
The New York Yankees who have won 27 world series to second place’s 11.
Tom Brady who possesses the most Super Bowl wins, completions, passing yards, and dozens of other cool quarterback stats.
LeBron James who probably isn’t the GOAT but is GOATly enough having scored the most points.
Michael Phelps who has 23 Olympic gold medals to second place’s 9.
Roger Federer who was the most dominant for the longest period of time.
Rafael Nadal who is and will always be the master of clay.
Novak Djokovic who despite the other two has many of the biggest records in tennis.
People like Michael Jordan pre-date my caring about sports by too many years to register here.
People like Caitlin Clark I’ll follow until there’s no point. If she stayed on to play in college another year, I’d be rooting for her to shower her existing records with additional dominance and set a few more benchmarks in her destructive wake.
People like Messi and Ronaldo mean nothing to me because I’m from America and soccer isn’t real but I hope with all my heart that they score an unfathomable number of additional goals, win every game, and lift every trophy available to them until they retire.
If there are other GOATS out there, long may they reign. I wish I had time to watch all of them, but I just don’t really like sports that much.
I suppose that is at the crux of it. I don’t care enough about these elevated hobbies we call sports to bother rooting for anything other than the favorite. I don’t have time to learn the teams and the players. Just tell me who the best is and let’s get it over with. If that makes me a fair-weather fan so be it. If capitalism were a sport, I’d probably own a Bezos jersey.
So…will Djokovic win a record breaking 25th grand slam title? Will LeBron, with the most points of all time, score more points? Will Tom Brady come back out of retirement and do more of all the things he does? This is what I care about. And while I don’t love sports, I do actually care about records. Which means that when LeBron’s team is out of the playoffs or Djokovic drops out of a tournament, I lose interest in the tournament, and in the sport, and in all sports. Like a sleeper agent, I only come alive when activated.
What matters to me is the solidification of the GOAT status: the greatest entities in sports winning everything all the time to the point where their careers are unrepeatable, their records uncatchable, and any real comparison with future athletes is inconceivable.
Because once this solidification is complete then I, and in fact all of us, can stop watching sports entirely. The GOATS already did it all and we were alive when they did it. Some of us were at those games, some of us were watching those big moments on TV, and others of us checked the scores occasionally on our phones and said ‘nice’ all along the way.
Then, what will we do with this free time gifted us in our post-sports world? Maybe we’ll all start reading books… because in literature it doesn’t matter that all the GOATS are dead. We can spend the rest of our lives reading their many works, reviewing their highlights, and rooting for the white whale, who Vegas odds list as a heavy favorite vs. Captain Ahab.
Bravo! A philosophical statement from, of all places, the heart.