Let’s End the “Greatest of All Time” Talk

To believe that a certain athlete, musician, artist, political leader, or writer is not just “great” but “the greatest of all time” is to give undue weight to our time and to our own experience. It also unnecessarily forecloses our imaginative horizons that something or someone can indeed come along and surpass what we may be witnessing now.

Tom Brady

In the wake of Tom Brady’s unprecedented seventh Super Bowl crown—a victory which gives him as an individual more Super Bowl titles than any single NFL franchise—the conversation surrounding Mr. Brady’s win has been dominated by “GOAT” (Greatest of All Time) talk. “Tony,” said Michael Wilbon to his longtime Pardon the Interruption (PTI) partner Tony Kornhauser on ESPN’s PTI the day after Super Bowl LIV, “he’s the greatest. He’s the GOAT.” Mr. Brady’s seventh Super Bowl victory and fifth Super Bowl Most Valuable Player award prompted the Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd to declare that “there is no debating it—Tom Brady is considered the greatest of all time”, and led ESPN’s Mike Greenberg to aver that “it’s hard to argue that Tom Brady is anything other than the GOAT.”

Before the Super Bowl, the discussion about Mr. Brady also focused on his purported “GOAT”-status. CBS hyped the game as a matchup between “the greatest of all time versus the greatest of this time.” The New York Times’ Frank Bruni discussed whether fans are right to call Mr. Brady “the Goat.” ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, following Mr. Brady’s defeat of Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers in the game that clinched Mr. Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ berth in the Super Bowl, tweeted, “Props to @TomBrady. He is the G.O.A.T.” And the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay stated that though Mr. Brady (at 43 years old) may be a “geezer,” he is “still a Goat.”

Even before the Super Bowl, our sports and culture discourse has come to be governed by “GOAT” talk at a progressively increasing rate. After Michael Jordan’s retirement, basketball fans around the world canonized the Chicago Bulls legend as the indisputably greatest player of all time, prompting much agonized discussion among basketball fans in the past several years over whether LeBron James may be a legitimate contender to Jordan’s formerly unanimous “GOAT” status. Hockey fans—as well as the larger international hockey community—closed the book on all “GOAT” discussion years ago by beatifying all-time points leader Wayne Gretzky as “the Great One.” Every sport now seems to have its “GOAT.” In soccer, it’s Pelé. In boxing, Muhammad Ali. In baseball, depending on whom you ask, it’s either Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, or Willie Mays. In literature, the late Harold Bloom became famous (and infamous) for advocating “bardolatry,” the belief that Shakespeare’s character-constructing capabilities are so unrivaled, and are so unsurpassable, as to make him not only the literary “GOAT” but something approaching a literary god. And now in football, apparently, it’s Tom Brady, baptized by the Ringer’s Bill Simmons as “an undisputed GOAT,” now and for all times.

While a part of all this “GOAT” talk and these “GOAT” debates may be fun, there’s something troubling—if not downright dangerous—about them. In order to understand our current obsession with “GOATs,” and in order to understand why all our “GOAT” talk is so problematic, we need to turn not to sports but to religion, the field of human endeavor where the first great “GOAT” debates began.

The great medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar Moses Maimonides was the first authority to wade into the GOAT debates, declaring that the biblical Moses was the greatest prophet who has or who will ever live. “Moses was superior to all prophets,” wrote Maimonides in his commentaries, “whether they preceded him or arose afterwards. Moses attained the highest possible human level. He perceived God to a degree surpassing every human that ever existed… God spoke to all other prophets through an intermediary. Moses alone did not need this; this is what the Torah means when God says, ‘Mouth to mouth, I will speak him.’” Jews around the world now take it for granted that Moses is clearly and indisputably the greatest figure in the history of Judaism—many Jews chant a poem called “Yigdal” at the conclusion of Friday night prayers every week declaring that “no one will ever arise in Israel like Moses”—but prior to Maimonides the case was not so clear. The Talmud (c. 500 C.E.) flatly contradicts Maimonides’ assertion that Moses’ prophecy was never surpassed, noting that the biblical prophet Samuel also prophesized and spoke to God in a direct, unmediated manner (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 31b, Ta’anit 5b). The Talmud also states that the biblical scribe Ezra was at least as great as Moses—as worthy of receiving the Torah at Sinai as was Moses (Sanhedrin 21b)—and audaciously asserts that the Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva was even greater than Moses, going so far as to imagine a scenario in which Moses is sitting in Akiva’s classroom but cannot understand the interpretations that Akiva is giving to Moses’s own teachings (Menakhot 29b).

If there was no consensus in Judaism over whether Moses was “the Goat,” then what prompted Maimonides to declare him as such? Many modern scholars believe that Maimonides was impelled to promulgate a set of Jewish principles of faith (prior to Maimonides there had been no official codified set of Jewish beliefs) because of what had been taking place with Judaism’s sister Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam. Christianity had promulgated a doctrine now known as “supersessionism,” which asserted that the New Testament had replaced the Old one and that Jesus’s teachings had superseded Moses’s. Islam’s doctrine of tahrif subsequently declared that Muhammad’s teachings had surpassed them all, asserting that Muhammad was an even greater divine messenger than either Jesus or Moses. Maimonides was thus moved to attempt to reassure the medieval Jewish community that it need not worry—Moses was not only the greatest prophet of his time but the greatest prophet of all time. Maimonides’ declarations of Moses’ “GOAT” status, however, did little to sway the debate between Jews and members of other monotheistic faiths, and the competing Abrahamic “GOAT” debates provoked a deadly theological arms race which led to pogroms, crusades, jihads, and the horrifying wars of religion, with each faith believing that its divine messenger was the greatest of all time and that anyone who claimed otherwise was a heretic who deserved to be killed.

It is unlikely that our current “GOAT” debates will lead to bloodshed in the way that the “GOAT” debates of religion did, but they are still harmful for other reasons, because they convey a fundamentally pessimistic attitude toward life and human experience. To believe that a certain athlete—or musician, artist, political leader, or writer—is not just “great” but “the greatest of all time”—that is, that not only have we never seen someone as great at his or her craft as this person but that we will never see someone as great at his or her craft as this person—is to give undue weight to our time and to our own experience. Historians would characterize this as the cardinal sin of “presentism,” a quasi-narcissistic belief that there is something essentially special about our time, in contrast to all other times of history—past or future. It also unnecessarily forecloses our imaginative horizons that something or someone can indeed come along and surpass what we may be witnessing now, as great as we believe the athlete whom we are currently privileged to watch may be. Around 2006, tennis fans were almost universally certain that Roger Federer was the greatest men’s player of all time. A year later, a Spanish player named Rafael Nadal came along and, somewhat shockingly, began to go toe-to-toe on the court with the near-certain “GOAT” of men’s tennis. Today Mr. Nadal owns 20 Grand Slams, equaling Mr. Federer’s mark. Novak Djokovic, who now holds 18 major titles after his triumph last month in Melbourne at the Australian Open, may yet surpass them both.

Who is to say that another football player may not come along—perhaps in our children’s or grandchildren’s times—who will win eight Super Bowls and surpass the “undisputed GOAT”? Who is to say that there is not a girl growing up right now in northern Chile who will become an even greater soccer player than Pelé, or that in the 22nd century there will not be a boy from South Korea who will be an even greater baseball player than Babe Ruth? Why cut ourselves—and our children and grandchildren—off from the hopes and expectation that their times and their athletic and cultural heroes may outshine our own? The history of religion teaches us that we would be better off with the kind of theological and cultural modesty exemplified by the Talmud, rather than with the doctrinaire creeds of medieval monotheism. Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and Babe Ruth may all be great—but there is nothing wrong with believing (as another so-called “GOAT” once sang) that the best is yet to come.

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The featured image is a photograph of Tom Brady from the Washington Football Team vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers at FedEx Field (2021), uploaded by All-Pro Reels Photography, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. It appears here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.