The Greatest Blog Written Ever

A reporter for CNN in London reported that the groups of demonstrators at the G20 Summit were unprecedented. The criteria she was basing this assumption on is open to suspicion. It couldn’t have been the sheer number of protesters participating. There have been numerous assemblies that have far exceeded those gathered in England. Did she mean the multiple groups protesting different issues? Perhaps, but what constituted this statement of grandeur wasn’t made clear. To grab the viewer’s attention, the reporter resorted to a common practice in media today, the abuse of hyperbole.
Our society is so immersed in mediocrity it’s hard to believe how superlatives are strewn about like so much confetti. This is particularly true of news media. Those who occupy anchor desks, and those who cover the news and sports in print, seem compelled to buttonhole any event or persons by using words like “unprecedented,” “unmatched,” “unequaled,” “largest,” “biggest,” “greatest,” “fastest,” “most,” and the supremely popular “best.”
Often the hyperbole needs an exclamation point, so for extra emphasis if we are not already duly impressed, “ever” is added. “Of all time” is occasionally substituted when the need arises. Is this all really necessary, or warranted for that matter?
Exaggeration is not new in American vernacular. There was a time not too long ago when it was the benchmark of excellence for something to be “the Cadillac of...” referring to the most prestigious General Motors nameplate. A Viking refrigerator is the “Cadillac” of refrigerators just for example. Now, Cadillac is no longer even the best car.
Something monumental was once considered to be “Ruthian” in stature. A term associated with George Herman “Babe” Ruth, the great New York Yankee slugger. Baseball announcers have often referred to unusually long or high arcing home runs as “Ruthian” blasts. A mansion could be of “Ruthian” proportions. Thankfully, no one will ever refer to a ten thousand square foot home as “Bondsian.” Sports are a fertile breeding ground for unfounded superlatives.
The current NCAA tournament has given us “the best defender in college basketball,” “the best pure shooter the game has seen in quite some time,” “the most physical player I’ve ever seen on both ends of the floor.” I didn’t realize that when I watched the Villanova/Pittsburgh game, that I was witnessing “one of the greatest games in tournament history” according to Verne Lundquist of CBS sports. If that was one of the greatest games in tournament history, then I guess the tournament hasn’t been all that great for the last sixty years or so. Maybe I should stop watching, ‘cause geez, how can any game from here on out top that one? Oh, that’s right; the talking heads will just call the next really good game “one of the greatest” and move on. It doesn’t end there.
Is Manny Ramirez the greatest clutch hitter in history? I don’t know. I’d have to research mounds of statistics, read thousands of pages of coverage, and watch hundreds of games to give you an accurate assessment. But who has the time for that? Statistics show Ramirez is one of the best RBI men in history, but there is nothing to definitively determine “clutch.”
Did you know that in succession, Christy Mathewson, Sal Maglie, Sandy Koufax, Bert Blyleven, and Dwight Gooden all had “the best curveball in baseball history?” How do you determine that without polling every player who ever faced all these men? That’s like me saying “I’m the world’s biggest asshole” when I haven’t met everyone in the world.
Michael Jordan has been anointed by current sports pundits "the greatest basketball player of all time," regardless of criteria. See, this is true because they tell us it is so, because they’re the experts right? Wilt Chamberlain averaged fifty points a game for an entire season. Oscar Robertson average a triple double for an entire season (points, rebounds, and assists). Did, or could Michael Jordan have done that? Now the debate rages on about whether Kobe Bryant is a better player than Michael Jordan. Occasionally LeBron James’ name comes up. Yet, you never here Larry Bird or Magic Johnson’s name come up, much less Oscar Robertson or Wilt Chamberlain. Discussions of this type are to be reserved for sports bars and dens. Comparisons such as these should not be made during any sports program lest younger viewers think, as I’ve said before, that sports began in 1980.
Mohammad Ali, the self professed “Greatest” really was. There is little debate. Let that be our guideline for all athletes. Let’s make sports announcers preface their overstatements with “In my opinion…” before making some absurd declaration of supremacy. Let’s make sure newscasters qualify their remarks with relevant criteria before blurting out more gloom and doom. Let’s enact these recommendations now before these folks become the Edsels of media coverage.