Professors and writing tutors will tell you that superlatives should, for the most part, be avoided at all costs. To describe something as the greatest or the worst is dangerous, because those moments are fleeting, and the next one can come all too quickly. However, as I sat in the United Center just two days into the New Year, staring up at the Bulls six championship banners and Michael Jordan’s retired number, all I could think of were superlatives. Michael Jordan won six NBA Championships and five regular season MVP awards, while being selected to fourteen all star games. Few have ever dominated their sport and racked up the accolades like Jordan did. But perhaps the most important characteristic of Michael Jordan is something that often gets overlooked when talking about great athletes, how clutch he was. Watching Michael Jordan was like watching an Oscar worthy movie when you already knew the ending. When a shot needed to be hit, everyone in the entire arena, including the opposing team, knew that he was getting the ball, and yet somehow he managed to score every time. It was not so much that he scored, but the fact that everyone knew he was going to score before he actually did. I have often said that I wish I had been just a few years older in the 90s, so I could have truly appreciated what I was witnessing. But instead, I simply had to be told that as I sat with my family inside the United Center, I was witnessing history and the greatest man to ever play the game of basketball.
Flash forward to 2008 and at age 21, I am now more than capable of comprehending exactly what I have witnessed. And what I have just witnessed is the greatest year in sports history. Moments that in other years would have defined that year, have been relegated to the back burners in 2008. Will anyone remember that Danica Patrick became the first woman to win an Indy event? What about the Tampa Bay Rays astonishing turn around which led them to the 2008 World Series? Or the Boston Celtics turn around, who after winning just 24 games in 06-07, won 66 in 07-08 and the NBA Title. But will anyone remember outside of Boston? What about Tom Glavine’s 300th career win, followed by his retirement? These were all amazing moments in sports, but they will struggle to be remembered in a year that saw four sporting moment come together to form a year for the ages. The thread that weaves in-and-out of these moments is the same quality that Michael Jordan possessed: clutch.
It all started on February 3rd in Glendale, Arizona. 2007 had been a disaster for sports. It was a year marked more by the players’ antics outside the playing arena, then their heroics during competition. But the hangover of 2007 was quickly forgotten with a few missed tackles and a catch that has become known simply as “the helmet catch”. With one minute and fifteen seconds remaining in Super Bowl XLII, the New York Giants faced a 3rd-and-5 from their own 44-yard line. Manning took the snap and managed to spin away from the grasps of just about every New England Patriot defensive lineman. He found an opening and heaved the ball downfield to a well covered David Tyree, who out-jumped the Patriots Rodney Harrison and caught the ball, pinning it against his helmet with one hand as he fell to the ground. The Giants would go on to score and win the game 17-14, spoiling the Patriots bid for a perfect 18-0 season. Tom Brady got one last shot at driving down the field. All the Patriots needed was a field goal to send it into overtime. Many believed that Brady would lead a game-winning miraculous drive. In fact, they saw it as inevitable. He had done it so many times before, 28 to be exact. But four incomplete passes later, the team that won 21 straight games and every game in the 07-08 season, had fallen. The wild-card David had defeated the No. 1 Goliath. And thus the stage was set for 2008.
Four months later in northern San Diego, the world bore witness to one of the gutsiest, and perhaps greatest, sporting victories of all time. Many dismiss golf as merely a pastime. Others will tell you that golfers are not real athletes. But even the biggest of disbelievers had to at least show some respect after what Tiger Woods accomplished at the U.S. Open in June. In April of 2008, Tiger Woods had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery. During his rehab, he sustained a double stress fracture of his left tibia. While undoubtedly painful, Tiger was still able to play. As Tiger made the turn onto the back nine of Saturday’s third round, he was grimacing in pain and struggling on the course. Critics questioned whether Tiger was simply playing up his stress fracture to atone for his performance on the course. But in just nine holes, Tiger managed to shoot five-under par, create three highlight reel shots (which combined to hold the number 3 spot on SportsCenters top 10 plays of the year), and catapult himself into first place heading into the final round. As Woods approached the thirteenth hole, he was five shots behind Rocco Mediate. But a 70-foot eagle putt, followed by the biggest fist pump of his career, was all Tiger needed to get the momentum rolling. He chipped in for birdie on 17 and could do nothing but laugh at himself, perhaps questioning whether he really was that good. He finished the day with a 40-foot curling putt for eagle on 18. Woods would go on to win in a playoff as many expected he would. And that’s what makes Tiger Woods so dominate. As people watched Tiger struggle, many were just waiting for that inevitable moment when Tiger would turn it on. That moment when he needed a putt and you did not even have to watch it, because you knew it was going in. Just like when Jordan would get the ball in his hands for a game winning shot, you knew Tiger was going to make it. For me the defining moment of what Tiger had accomplished came as I was driving into Chicago on the last day of the tournament, listening to Mike and Mike on ESPN Radio complain about how golf is not a grueling sport and that people were blowing Tiger’s double-stress fracture out of proportion. At one point during the discussion Mike said, “It’s just not a serious injury. Now if we were talking about a torn ACL, Tiger’s performance would be one for the ages.” Funny, two days after Tiger won the U.S. Open, he announced that he would have to miss the rest of the 2008 season, due to the fact he had been playing on a torn ACL, which he had been concealing from the media.
There is another man who like Jordan and like Woods has completely dominated his sport, Roger Federer. But on a rainy evening on the grass courts of Wimbeldon, David struck again conquering Goliath. To say Federer has dominated tennis in recent memory would be an understatement. There is a reason that Federer and Tiger Woods have developed a close friendship: they are in a league of their own. Indeed, for the past two years Rafael Nadal had lost to Federer in the finals of Wimbledon, while Federer had accumulated 65 straight victories on grass and five straight Wimbledon titles. He was going for number six and the record books. Nadal and Federer could not have been set up as bigger polar opposites. Nadal from Spain is scrappy, muscle-shirt wearing, and known for his clay court brilliance. Federer from Switzerland is calm, classy, and methodical in his dispatching of opponents. The two battled through rain delays and the longest match in the history of Wimbledon, clocking in at four hours and 48 minutes. Nadal took the first two sets and managed to get the third into a tiebreak, but Federer would win the third set. Nadal would have two shots at championship point in the fourth set, but again Federer would prevail. It seemed at this point that the tides had turned. Momentum was on Federer’s side and has he had done so many times before; it appeared he would defeat Nadal. Federer just simply never lost, especially on grass. The two players both squandered break points in the fifth set until all was square at 7-7. With Federer on serve in the 15th game, he would fight off three break points before eventually falling. Nadal would serve out the match and end the reign of the undisputed king of tennis.
So with two wins for David and one for a badly bruised Goliath, we move into August. While Jordan and Woods both dominated their sports, perhaps the single most dominating performance of all time has been saved for last, and saved for a venue that, until this year, would probably never have been mentioned in the same breath with the greatest sports performances of all time. What Michael Phelps accomplished in Beijing, though, was nothing short of breathtaking. The hype surrounding Beijing would have been impossible for Phelps to surpass, only meet. It was as if Beijing and NBC were attempting to write history. They put swimming on primetime in the U.S., built a swimming cube that was designed to break world-records, and all that was left was for Phelps to live up to his end of the bargain. It was a task that seemed Herculean. Watching Phelps’s eight races, however, was like watching pre-ordained greatness. No matter what happened Phelps would get his eight medals, even when it seemed like he was down and out. When Alain Bernard had half a body length on Jason Lezak during the last 15 meters of the 4x100m freestyle relay, it seemed like Phelps’s quest for eight would be over before it even got started. And yet Jason Lezak swam the fastest 100 meters that any human being ever has, to complete the most unexpected comeback a swimming pool has ever seen. That is until Michael Phelps took the pool to try and win his seventh gold medal of the Beijing Olympics. Four years earlier in Athens, Phelps had completed one of the greatest swimming comebacks in the 100m butterfly, over his teammate Ian Crocker. In 2008, lightning would strike again, but this time it was Milorad Cavic who fell victim to the unstoppable Phelps train. Phelps who was in seventh at the turn, closed in the last 50 meters and took what was technically a mistake stroke. But this is the Phelps fairytale and what would have cost any other swimmer, in any other race, turned out to be the deciding factor in a race that Phelps won by one one-hundreth of a second, the smallest margin a swim race can be decided by. At the end of the day, Phelps had accumulated eight gold medals and seven world records, making him the most prolific Olympian, in terms of gold medals, of all time. ESPN named Phelps’s race the number one play of the year, Sports Illustrated named him the Athlete of the Year, and many have called him the greatest athlete of all time. Whatever title you may or may not think he deserves, without question this was the greatest sports moment of 2008.
Clutch is not something you teach and it’s not something you can buy, but it is something that all great athletes have. Some players are lucky enough to make one, maybe two clutch plays in their careers, but the truly great ones are so clutch that they do it every time and you know they’ve made the shot or won the race, before it even begins. So, it is fitting that Michael Jordan’s final act as a Chicago Bull was a game winning shot to win his sixth NBA Title. You could not have written a better ending to his storybook career with the Chicago Bulls. It had to end that way, just in the same way that Tiger Woods had to win that U.S. Open and Michael Phelps had to win all eight gold medals. Tom Brady and Roger Federer will be remembered as two of the greatest athletes in their sports, but will they be considered the greatest after their crushing defeats?
So in closing, let me apologize for all the superlatives in this post. As an English major, my professors would surely be disappointed. But as we begin to add the names of Woods, Federer, Nadal, Phelps, and the New York Giants to the pantheon of athletic greatness, superlatives become a necessity.
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