Culturally important sports players

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Inspired by this thread, we should talk about this. Who are the most culturally important sports figures of all time?

I think the top five or so are pretty easy:

1. Jackie Robinson: Great player who has the mental courage to break the color barrier in baseball
2. Jesse Owens: Outran Hitler
3. Babe Ruth: First superhero in professional sports
4. Muhammad Ali: Principled civil and religious freedom rights activist, plus a really great boxer
5. Michael Jordan: Likely the greatest basketball player ever; redefined what it meant to be a professional athlete "brand"

Other people who could make this list include (or the next rung or so below): Jack Johnson, Mike Tyson, Curt Flood, Tiger Woods, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Thorpe, Jim Brown, George Mikan, Shaquille O'Neal, and for the sake of adding a hockey player, Wayne Gretzky. Oh, and of course Diego Maradona, David Beckham, and Pele.

I think what qualifies athletes to have truly lasting culturally importance are 1. great talent and, more importantly, 2. make a lasting and important contribution to society.

To that end, I think it's his merchandise acumen that makes Michael Jordan a better addition to a top five list than Abdul-Jabbar, even though their on-court impact may have been similar. And while Jackie Robinson is far from the greatest player of all time, I think integrating baseball is a far more important legacy than hitting dingers. Ditto Jesse Owens, who's more remembered for embarrassing Hitler than any individual athletic achievement.

I'm also trying really hard to add Allen Iverson to this list. He was a great talent, and helped usher in a new era of NBA personalities. We went from Michael Jordan's "Republicans buy sneakers too" kind of commercialism to Iverson's brand that succeeded in spite of some now pretty embarrassing critique based on how he acted, spoke and dressed. There was before Iverson and after Iverson, and he deserves a lot of credit for changing expectations of what NBA superstardom meant.

[FGM13]

Maurice Richard. The original superstar. So popular with French Canadians that they trashed their city just because he was suspended, and received an absolutely huge memorial service at his death. One of the most beloved picture books in history (Canadian history) is written about a kid being ostracized simply for not wearing his Rocket jersey. No one had that cultural significance in hockey until Gretzky came along.

Jean Beliveau is up there with him, too.

[johnnysama]

Wayne Gretzky. 'Nuff said.

[The_Admiral]

I'm also trying really hard to add Allen Iverson to this list. He was a great talent, and helped usher in a new era of NBA personalities. We went from Michael Jordan's "Republicans buy sneakers too" kind of commercialism to Iverson's brand that succeeded in spite of some now pretty embarrassing critique based on how he acted, spoke and dressed. There was before Iverson and after Iverson, and he deserves a lot of credit for changing expectations of what NBA superstardom meant.

I think people want Iverson to be more than what he was because of what an awful lull the post-Jordan-pre-LeBron NBA was (with a hint of what we'll go ahead and call Richard Sherman Syndrome). He was a fantastic point guard who burned himself out from willing mediocre/bad Sixers teams through a pretty grim era of the NBA. As for "introducing hip-hop culture" or whatever, that feels like something that happened (and was going to happen) gradually rather than any one guy coming in and blowing the doors off. It just seems that way because of what a singular role Iverson played on his team in his prime. Besides, if anyone blew the doors off, it was Dennis Rodman.

[dfwabel]

In phone, but Billie Jean King is easily top 5.

12 singles Grand Slam titles and 39 overall; Founded what is now the WTA*; Co-Founded the Women’s Sports Foundation a decade before Title IX officially applied to sports and that is before her role in the LGBT community (watch the HBO special from 2006 or the more one-sided PBS "American Masters" from 2013 for all the evidence needed)

*-The biggest downside is that to start the tour she took tobacco money from Phillip Morris' Virginia Slims brand.

[sc49erfan15]

Inspired by this thread, we should talk about this. Who are the most culturally important sports figures of all time?

I think the top five or so are pretty easy:

1. Jackie Robinson: Great player who has the mental courage to break the color barrier in baseball
2. Jesse Owens: Outran Hitler
3. Babe Ruth: First superhero in professional sports
4. Muhammad Ali: Principled civil and religious freedom rights activist, plus a really great boxer
5. Michael Jordan: Likely the greatest basketball player ever; redefined what it meant to be a professional athlete "brand"

I think that's a pretty easy top 5. I can't argue any of the others you mentioned into that 5, or any of those out of it. About the only player I can think of from the top of my head that you left out of your more extensive list is Magic Johnson. The litmus test for this is basically, "How has this person impacted the world other than sports?" Forget counting championships or all-star game appearances, this is about bigger things. (For argument's sake, sports itself can be a "bigger thing" - Ruth and Jordan didn't do/haven't done much outside of sports, but they've helped to dramatically change the business of sports and how much of an impact sports have on our everyday lives.)

When I taught 10th grade World History, one of my ongoing assignments was A&E's "Biography of the Millennium," that highlighted the most influential people of years 1000-1999. (Great series, a bit Eurocentric and dated now, but still entertaining.) We'd watch a few clips of that every day. At the end of the semester, their final assignment was to write a paper arguing why at least 5 people on the list should be changed, as well as adding at least 2 people. Spoiler alert: there aren't any athletes on the list - of course, 10th grade boys want to add LeBron and Kobe. The only athletes I'd let them even consider adding were the exact 5 you mentioned.

TL;DR - that's my list too.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah, I can't argue with much of that list other than maybe the cultural importance of Shaq. I think he was certainly important, but not capital-I Important on the level of Kareem or Wilt.

[Foxxtrot44]

Detlef Schrempf certainly made us stop and reconsider our expectations of people who are allergic to sunlight.

[DarkJourney]

Roberto Clemente

[seattlesonicsofsacramento]

There's a huge gulf between "one of the top five most important NBA players in the immediate post-MJ era" and "one of the most culturally-important athletes of all time". And Iverson falls right into it.

I think he was being conservative (ironic, given that Iverson's importance comes from him blowing up the conservatism that MJ established, symbolized in the crossover heard round the world), whereas I was being bold because I believe that all the important things in history didn't happen before I was born (1991).

There's a lot of obvious/easy choices for culturally important sports players, including "first x to play pro y", and so I'm not really interested in those. Also, I can only speak from an American-centric point of view, in addition to some other nexuses I'll get to later. So, when we talk about most culturally important post-MJ NBA players, Yao Ming should obviously be in the top 5, but I say that in a pretty detached way. In fact, it almost gets into that "first x to play pro y" template again, except we can modify it a little into "first x to open up the y market in x". Yao just gets the most mileage out of that because of the mind-bogglingly huge populace he represents.

So, who else is in the top 5 post-MJ¹? Kobe and LeBron, but both only because of MJ, as potential successors and two subsequent generations' offerings as "best of all time". And as mentioned in the OP, this sort of cultural importance is the (in my opinion) disgusting brand-above-all-else cultural importance. Sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from my go-to most culturally important athlete of all time, Muhammad Ali, who preached radical politics in an admittedly more radical age.

So far, in no particular order: Yao, Kobe, and LeBron. In an age (i.e. late capitalism) where it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish cultural importance from brand strength, you may be tempted to fill in any number of famous players. But they volunteer in their communities! Sure they do, as the NBA encourages them and subsequently brags about to project a semblance of humanity, in a sort of grotesque example of a multi-billion dollar industry sending out multi-millionaires to mingle with the exploited members of our country. On the other hand, you might go to the "first x to open up the y market in x" and say what about Manu Ginobli? Or you may confuse cultural importance with basketball cultural importance and say "but hey, the Jailblazers and Malice in the Palace Pacers and Pistons forever changed the landscape of the NBA in their depravity, or the White Chocolate + Christie + Peja + C-Webb + Divac Kings kicked off the constant motion stretch the floor basketball that dominates today, or the current Rockets and Warriors are showing us all how the game will be played at the highest level for the next decade". But to me, the obvious fourth (though not in that order) member of this group is without question Allen Iverson.

Some reasons:

1. The Crossover: For you old sports romantics, here's the legendary moment that allows you to build a narrative about someone. The funny thing is, this is before the black uniforms, before the braids, before the arm sleeve, before the headband, before the scoring titles, before the steals titles, before the corresponding All-NBA and All-Defensive teams, before Jordan's second retirement even, making you question whether AI is even post-MJ. But nobody questions that, in retrospect, this moment heralded the changing of the guard (though, ironically, the guard position would remain unchanged for a while, thanks to AI, Kobe, and the countless other disciples of MJ hero-ball). This reason also named The Crossover because that move remains so closely tied to AI's streetball cred. In the immediate post-MJ era, And1 become huge, with its Mixtape Tour introducing streetball to kids who didn't live near a major city, and AI was the best player whose game you could see emulated in a game of streetball.
2. The Step-Over: As a kid living in SoCal during the Shaq & Kobe 3-peat, this video of AI doing Tyronn Lue dirty makes me cringe, for Tyronn Lue's sake. That Finals is the first one I can vividly remember watching, and seeing him will his team through an unstoppable 48 point night in that game was entirely frustrating at the time, and heroic in retrospect. I can only imagine what non-Lakers fans were feeling while watching it happen. In a (brief) era when it just took a duo (Shaq & Kobe, Duncan & Robinson), it seemed incredible for a relatively little guy to be able to pull off what he did.
3. The Viral Video: To be one of the most culturally important athletes, you need to influence other athletes. That's why MJ, despite being important for being the first all-conquering brand, has to be called one of the most culturally important athletes of all time, much to my regret. In this press conference, AI demonstrates how it's clear that Marshawn Lynch is his direct descendant. Dismissive yet quote-worthy, wearing street fashion, being an unstoppable force come game-time, even refusing to believe that much in PRACTICE (or training camp, for that matter). Lynch won't be the last either; you will see this AI-esque pro athlete for the rest of U.S. history, even if all his peers dress as hipsters with little actual care for style and more care for showing off what they can buy with their millions.
4. The Dress Code: I know I may have come off as a dick in this post, but my reaction was fueled by the sort of person who is dismissive of AI and who David Stern wanted to keep paying for NBA games and merchandise by protecting from "scary black guys" like Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson, Paul Pierce, and (the best player and thus highest-profile out of all these guys) Allen Iverson. In 2005-06, Stern introduced a dress code preventing certain NBA players from showing up to press conferences dressed like how they'd dress anywhere else. For an impressionable teen at the time such as myself, this was a declaration of cultural war. (I can still fit into some of my clothes from middle school because of how big they were.) You think Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant or LeBron James and Dwayne Wade look ridiculous now? That is how players with a cultural background not involving generic suits adapt to a league that wants everyone to be as un-scary to potential consumers as MJ.

I've already written way too much for a forum post, but sorry that I don't have my own website where I feel the need to post screeds such as this one. As I said, these are only some reasons why AI is one of the most culturally important NBA players post-MJ. I can argue further why he's one of the most culturally important athletes of all time, but it shouldn't need that much arguing if you (1) accept that he's one of the most culturally important players of one of the most culturally important sports leagues since the turn of the century (2) accept that a list of most culturally important athletes of all time can (or even must) include athletes from every era.

¹I'm not even going with immediate post-MJ because I think we can open it up more than that, defined as after his last championship in 1998, so 1998/99-Present. Coincidentally this post-Bulls dynasty vacuum that the Shaq & Kobe Lakers filled up is when I really started watching NBA games on my own, as opposed to reading box scores in the newspaper at my grandparents' house or watching random Bulls and Spurs games on the little old TV in their yacht when I was bored.

[bigbean24]

Wouldn't Lou Gehrig be a good one based on ALS?

[seattlesonicsofsacramento]

I'm also trying really hard to add Allen Iverson to this list. He was a great talent, and helped usher in a new era of NBA personalities. We went from Michael Jordan's "Republicans buy sneakers too" kind of commercialism to Iverson's brand that succeeded in spite of some now pretty embarrassing critique based on how he acted, spoke and dressed. There was before Iverson and after Iverson, and he deserves a lot of credit for changing expectations of what NBA superstardom meant.

I think people want Iverson to be more than what he was because of what an awful lull the post-Jordan-pre-LeBron NBA was (with a hint of what we'll go ahead and call Richard Sherman Syndrome). He was a fantastic point guard who burned himself out from willing mediocre/bad Sixers teams through a pretty grim era of the NBA. As for "introducing hip-hop culture" or whatever, that feels like something that happened (and was going to happen) gradually rather than any one guy coming in and blowing the doors off. It just seems that way because of what a singular role Iverson played on his team in his prime. Besides, if anyone blew the doors off, it was Dennis Rodman.

I feel like there's just a generational gap between us (if I'm wrong about that then I have no idea why we have such different perspectives). I hear everyone talking about the post-Jordan lull, but then again I hear a lot of people unwilling to hear anything other than Jordan is the greatest of all time and no one will ever take his place. I have a feeling all of those people live in the EST and CST. From the 1998-99 post-Bulls dynasty season to the 2003-04 LeBron James's first season, we saw the Lakers mini-dynasty 3-peat and the Spurs bookend that 3-peat with the start of their own dynasty. The West was best again. Gary Payton was still a Sonic. And the East even had its moments. Paul Pierce got stabbed and still teamed up with stretch-4-before-stretch-4s-were-a-thing Antoine Walker for some success. Vince Carter gave us the greatest dunks we'll ever see. There was plenty to enjoy.

As for your "As for 'introducing hip-hop culture' or whatever", it doesn't matter if it was eventually going to happen. Eventually black men were going to play in the MLB, eventually the MLB was going to get a guy who hit way more home runs than anyone else, etc. I'm skeptical of people who are great for being first too, but in the end you can't dismiss someone based on that. Yes, the Fab Five kicked off certain elements of the hip hop-basketball collision on the public stage, such as black socks, short shorts, and swag, but can you tell me some NBA players who did the same for their league? Dennis Rodman was much more punk rock/ball culture. Coming from a consumer of both the NBA and hip-hop such as myself, AI was the most noteworthy, but it's entirely possible that I missed someone who showed up between the Fab Five (who were freshman the year I was born) and ~1998.

Yeah, I can't argue with much of that list other than maybe the cultural importance of Shaq. I think he was certainly important, but not capital-I Important on the level of Kareem or Wilt.

Shaq was a great, dominant big man and continues to be very, very entertaining, but in what way was he culturally important? We've got to have different ideas of what cultural importance is if you think so.

[MadmanLA]

For everything he went through in chasing one of sports' most significant records, especially playing in the "Capital of the South" during the latter years of the Civil Rights movement, I think Henry Aaron deserves some recognition as well.

He was pretty much a quiet superstar, and perhaps not as vocal as many of his contemporaries, but he was the model of consistency.

[sc49erfan15]

I think it's worthy of discussion in itself that most of the "culturally important" athletes that we're mentioning are black. It's not that white athletes (or athletes of any other races) haven't done anything culturally important - just a testament to how critical race relations are to understanding 20th (and 21st, for that matter) century American culture.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

* Dr. J - The New York Nets' flying superstar symbolised a sea change in basketball standards and aesthetics. His cool and charisma were irresistible. Without Dr. J there's no Michael Jordan. Dr. J drove the ABA-NBA merger; and his departure from the Nets turned the ABA champions into an NBA afterthought.

* Joe DiMaggio - Before the Major Leagues had black players, an Italian was considered exotic. Back then, Italians were not considered white; we were the unassimilable "other", a swarthy hoarde whose burgeoning presence in this country spurred white America to veer towards eugenics. In response, Italians in America spent the 20th Century striving to become white -- a process which, while "successful", came with a terrible cost in terms of our humanity and our sympathy for other disfavoured ethnic and racial groups, including our fellow Latins.

When Joe D. came to the Majors, this process was still in its early stages. Life magazine ran a story on DiMaggio which reflected this status as "other", saying something along the lines of: even though Joe eats spaghetti and garlic, he slicks his hair back not with bear grease, but with water. (You know, just like we normal Americans do.)

The Italian journey to whiteness in America has a huge ugly side; nevertheless, the desire to be treated with dignity is a laudable one, and Joe D. was the symbol of that struggle. Indeed, before Italians' wholesale abandoning of our fellow Latins became apparent, Joe D. was beloved also by New York's Puerto Ricans, who identified with him just as strongly as the Italians did.

What we now know about DiMaggio's violence towards his wife Marilyn Monroe truly tarnishes his legacy. (Remember that iconic photo of Marilyn over the subway grate? Joe beat her up because of it.) But the fact remains that, in his time, Joe D. was one of the towering figures in American culture, a cultural phenomenon which far transcended sports.

[sc49erfan15]

I also don't know how we've gotten this far without mentioning Roberto Clemente.

[edit] scratch that, DarkJourney mentioned him above and I missed it.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

I think it's worthy of discussion in itself that most of the "culturally important" athletes that we're mentioning are black. It's not that white athletes (or athletes of any other races) haven't done anything culturally important - just a testament to how critical race relations are to understanding 20th (and 21st, for that matter) century American culture.

For sure. I put Babe Ruth in my initial list because he kind of has to be there, but all he really did was play baseball better than anyone else and be a big personality while doing so. He was an outsized personality, but not much more than the Andre the Giant of baseball. However, his legend has grown more than any of his contemporaries in the century or so since he played, and no one in baseball will ever be able to catch up.

I think it's also illuminating that there we aren't talking about football players. For the biggest sport in this country by far, you can't really point to too many individual players as having done something of great cultural import. I'm not sure what there is for football players to do. People have spoken out about CTE, but no one great is retiring early to avoid it. Michael Sam came out prior to being drafted, but he's not a great player so it sadly matters less. Ricky Williams quit the league to smoke weed, but that's not all that interesting. Peyton Manning uses his football career to sell pizza and car insurance, but he's also kind of a monster that way.

In defense of Shaq, I added him because I came of age when he was kind of the Babe Ruth of my time. Jordan was still in his prime, but Shaquille O'Neal was a force of nature in his early years. And he stayed dominant through his stint with the Lakers when he was able to take over NBA games at will. He killed his legacy toiling away on the Celtics, Cavs and Suns, but there was a time when no one could stop him. There isn't anyone in the league like that right now, and probably the only comparable player was Wilt Chamberlain.

[The_Admiral]

I think it's also illuminating that there we aren't talking about football players. For the biggest sport in this country by far, you can't really point to too many individual players as having done something of great cultural import.

That is very interesting. It shows how the game just chews everyone up and spits them out. No one is allowed to be bigger than football. Lots of people like that, but I find it suffocating.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

And you know who's NOT culturally important? This doofus.

I was a huge Carmelo Anthony fan since his days at Syracuse, but thinking again about the November 2014 ESPN article about him completely turned me off.

"So who exactly is Carmelo Anthony?" asks the branding expert, Anthony Rodriguez, kicking off the meeting. "What do you want to be known for?"

"That right there is the big question," Anthony says.

"Are you a basketball player? A New York Knick? The league's most unstoppable scorer?" Rodriguez asks.

"No way," Anthony says. "This isn't just about basketball. I hate just being known that way. It's got to be bigger than that."

...

"What I really want is a bulletproof legacy," he says. "How can I be known for being a visionary, for being truly great?"

There are guys like Roberto Clemente who died on humanitarian missions. Curt Flood sacrificed his career for free agency. Arthur Ashe went public with his AIDS diagnosis at a time when it wasn't yet culturally safe to do so.

But Melo gets a team of jerks together to discuss how he can be known for being -- but not actually being -- a visionary.

"What do you want to do long-term?" Goldfarb asked Anthony one night, already sensing his restlessness. Anthony started listing his interests: wine, cigars, clothing, art. "The high-end stuff," Anthony said.

"You're forgetting one," Goldfarb said. "What about tech?"

"You're right," Anthony said, because he always has been a self-described gadget freak, traveling on road trips with two iPads and three pairs of headphones. He likes to watch infomercials into the early morning, ordering whichever gadgets interest him and testing them out for a week before giving them away to friends.

Buying and asking people how he should define himself. Sounds like an awesome dude.

[The_Admiral]

Reminds me of how Derrick Rose said he doesn't try hard in games because he doesn't want sore knees when he's in business meetings later. In fact, it almost sounds like someone wrote a parody of the Rose thing: that his eventual "business meetings" would just be as vacuous as figuring out how to be known for being known.