136GreenRoad Posted November 19, 2006 Report Share Posted November 19, 2006 Grey Cup weekend is good time to celebrate heroes of sportJackie Parker was perhaps the greatest football player ever It's Grey Cup Day, time for some of us to sit back with a sigh and remember Jackie Parker, who died recently. He was just the greatest football player God ever created.... An amazing athlete. What about the best in other sports? Baseball. Forget Barry Bonds and the other juiced-up swaggerers of today. It's Babe Ruth all the way, the pitcher-turned-slugger who changed the very nature of the game. Tennis. Tilden, Kramer, Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, Borg, McEnroe, Sampras - great, all of them, and all eclipsed by the most ruthless competitor the sport ever saw, Martina Navratilova. I covered her at Wimbledon. The power she delivered with those old-fashioned wooden racquets was awesome. Soccer. Who else but Pele? Georgie Best for entertainment value.... Boxing. Muhammad Ali. He really was the Greatest, able to back up his outrageous poetry once the bell rang. Pound-for-pound, though, the finest fighter might have been Sugar Ray Robinson. I remember lying in bed, radio under the pillow, heart pounding, the night in 1952 he took Joey Maxim 13 rounds before being beaten by the heat in Yankee Stadium. My mother didn't let on she knew I was listening. Golf. Tiger Woods is making believers even of us skeptics who thought Jack Nicklaus had tougher competition in his day. Hockey sur glace. Okay, here it comes. Do we pick the Rocket, for his fire on ice? Or Gretzky, the one great scorer, whose numbers were stupendous even for the era of the automatic second assist? How about Gordie (Elbows) Howe, who starred into his 50s in this game of speed and intimidation? Good choices all, but the winner has to be Bobby Orr, the incomparable skater, of whom it used to be said: He should play in a higher league. His quarterbacking of Team Canada in the 1976 Canada Cup - basically, on one knee - was one of hockey's greatest performances.... Auto racing. Michael Schumacher has put up big numbers. Juan Manuel Fangio was the canny master of the old days. Canada's Gilles Villeneuve could get almost anything mechanical (including snowmobiles) around a circuit quicker than anyone else. But the greatest natural talent in the sport was Stirling Moss, driving at a time when things were horrendously more dangerous than they are today.... We opened with a giant. Let's close with one: Jim Thorpe. The American Indian from Oklahoma excelled in lacrosse, basketball, football, baseball, hockey and boxing. He dominated the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, winning both the decathlon and pentathlon. Then they took his medals away for the sin of playing professional baseball for $25 a game. "You are the greatest athlete in the world," King Gustav of Sweden told him. So he was; maybe the greatest ever. But you should have seen Jackie Parker. ... More: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news...1a-80358bfb748f Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sex Panther Posted December 4, 2006 Report Share Posted December 4, 2006 Bret Hart Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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