Editor’s Note: Gene Seymour is a critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @GeneSeymour. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
I’m fed up with GOATs.
Had it with them. Past done. If you could see where my right hand is as I write “Up to here with GOATs,” it’s about six inches over my head – and I wish my arms were longer.
By GOATs, as you can tell from the capital letters, I mean the acronym and not the barnyard animals. They can stay around for as long as they like, doing their part to clear excess trash and stuff.
I speak instead of the shorthand description for Greatest Of All Time. If you watch or read about sports, you’re all too aware of that species of GOAT. It has lately seemed as though GOATs pop up every other day, or week.
And not just in sports. When Beyoncé Knowles made history the other night by winning the 32nd Grammy Award in her career, overtaking the late symphony conductor Georg Solti, presenter James Corden properly acknowledged the historic weight of the moment, but took it a step further by declaring Her Royal Bey-ness the GOAT because she had accumulated so many more of those shiny megaphone trophies than anyone before.
“Greatest-Of-All-Time”? Really? Granted, Knowles has had a fabulous, even extraordinary career with more accomplishments likely to come. But “All Time” takes in a whole lot of territory, including, off the top of one’s head: Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, Duke Ellington, Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Maria Callas, Prince, Sarah Vaughan, and yes, maestro Solti himself, whose 22-year stint as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s musical director made it all but preeminent among other such organizations all over the world.
Thirty-two trophies make you “greater” than all those people and at least 40-50 others one could add? Hmmm…
All this GOAT talk with Beyoncé was likely exacerbated by last week’s retirement (maybe, finally?) of 45-year-old quarterback Tom Brady from professional football after a storied, near-unprecedented 23-year career.
Brady, who’d retired exactly a year before this latest announcement but changed his mind to eke out one more season under center, has been so habitually labeled the greatest quarterback, and – remarkably, by some – as the greatest football player period (!), that the GOAT acronym has, to all intents and purposes, become virtually synonymous with his name.
The primary reason is that he’s played in more Super Bowls (nine) and won more (six) than any other quarterback. There are more than a few spoilsports out there willing to mitigate such superlatives by mentioning that Brady lost three of those Very Big Games while Joe Montana, who’d retired from football after a relatively paltry 16 seasons, won all four of the Super Bowls he’d played.
Such hair-splitting will likely continue in the days, months and even years ahead – especially now that LeBron James of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers has surpassed previous Laker legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring total of 38,387 points. James broke the record late in a home game Tuesday, which ended in a loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder with Abdul-Jabbar, now a distinguished writer and cultural pundit, looking on with approval.
The GOAT chants are building to a fervent pitch around James’s name against those who believe Michael Jordan closed off the GOAT discussion in professional basketball with his six titles with the Chicago Bulls. Meanwhile, Abdul-Jabbar’s onetime Laker coach Pat Riley, now an executive with the Miami Heat, has felt compelled to promote the now-75-year-old Artist Formerly Known as Lew Alcindor for the latter’s title-laden career.
“OK, OK,” James’s acolytes insist. “But did Jordan or Kareem win titles for three different teams the way LeBron has?”
And on and on… and on the arguments will go.
Don’t get me wrong. King James is great and so, for that matter, is Queen Bey. Both have prevailed in their respective realms in large part through an alchemy of adaptability, ingenuity and sheer endurance. But since when did the mere accumulation of trophies and “records” (however one defines them) represent the prevailing standard by which “greatness” (however one defines it) is firmly established? Such a standard makes “GOAT” into a final and absolute judgment on a person’s career without greater nuance or closer scrutiny.
It’s a standard that turns “greatness” into nothing more than a “King of the Hill” game, a paraphrase of the sentiment, attributed to the late billionaire Malcolm Forbes, that “he who dies with the most toys wins,” one of those phrases that launched t-shirts, bumper stickers and, later, memes.
But having the most trophies shouldn’t be the only criteria for judging, enjoying or being inspired by an artist or athlete. Let’s go back to Brady. From the time he emerged from obscurity in 2001 as a second-year NFL player (and sixth-round draft pick) to lead the New England Patriots from longtime mediocrity into perennial playoff contenders and Super Bowl winners, Brady developed into a prolific passer and clutch scorer, holding every meaningful quarterbacking record in the NFL.
Sportscasters often referred to him as an “escape artist” for his ability to pull winning plays from seemingly impossible situations. He enabled the Patriots to be a dynasty for not just one, but two decades. Brady excelled at his work and was often impressive and entertaining while carrying it out.
To my own eyes, however, there was something almost too seamless and slick about Brady’s unprecedented ascent to GOAT-ness. Everything about Brady, from his private life to his health regimen, was geared toward the single-minded pursuit of victory and the enhancement of his reputation. As Dave Zirin, a sporstwriter for The Nation, put it in a gimlet-eyed assessment published before Brady’s last Super Bowl in 2021, “Brady is all about his brand. He is more brand than man.”
All of this is a bit afield from his GOAT-ness, but it doesn’t sound like fun.
And fun is what one gets from watching certain players, whether they’re Jordan reinventing open space with each approach to the basket, Barry Sanders whirling around potential tacklers to find a seam in the defense wide enough to breach for big gains, Megan Rapinoe’s exuberant blend of slash-and-burn dynamics and precision passing in securing a goal for the American women’s national soccer team.
These and others may not be GOATs. There can’t be but one GOAT per sport if the acronym has any meaning. But you can find something to embrace, even exalt in their individual styles of play without finding it necessary to declare them the one-and-only all-time greats in their sports.
Speaking of soccer, my own exhaustion with GOATs reached its breaking point at the conclusion of last December’s FIFA World Cup, when Argentina’s victory in general and team captain Lionel Messi’s play in particular compelled the sports punditocracy (many of whose members should know better) that Messi had once and for all established himself as world football’s GOAT.
Messi’s triumph after a long run of bad luck in previous World Cup competitions seemed to entitle him to such hyperbole. But it came shortly before the death, at 82, of Pelé, the Brazilian superstar whose prolific scoring, charismatic presence, and daredevil play did the most to popularize his sport globally. Even with the distance of time, how could any player, even one as talented as Messi, be considered greater in his or anybody else’s time than Pelé?
I suppose, then, that if we’re going to have GOATs, they should exist in the context of history, their status dependent on what exactly we mean by “all time.”
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But it’s one of the most exasperating ironies of our present time that just as much of the world seems intent on upending hierarchies of all kinds, it’s also enthralled by and invested in the need (and the rush) to declare all-time greats just because they’ve won the most “toys” or clambered to the top of a hill. I’m even starting to hear TV people trying to get around this dilemma by declaring somebody or other in the same sport “another GOAT” or “three GOATs.”
Which is why I’ve had it with GOATs. I don’t begrudge those filling hours at a barber shop or a corner bar arguing about who is or isn’t a GOAT. I’m just asking to leave me out of it. I’m now content to say there are performers in many arenas I feel closest to in spirit because of how they do their work, play their games, sing their songs. They’re likely not all-time greats and have been superseded by newer, younger talent. But they’re great enough for me.