Yeah, he almost forced his way out of Houston multiple times, that’s what I was thinking of as well.

Well cross him off then! #majorleague

I love Barry Sanders, one of my favorite athletes of all time, but I think he’s a debatable top 10 — Brady, Rice, Jim Brown, LT, Unitas seem pretty much like locks, then you get into Payton, Sanders, Reggie White, Elway, Montana, Butkus, Manning, Emmit, etc.

You’re right though — Aaron and Musial should be on the list, and I’d add Mays too.

Nah, I’m saying I forgot a lot of baseball players — Aaron, Mays, Musial.

Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, Bonds, Clemens, Pete Rose, Ty Cobb — I think there’s room for debate :)

I mean, that’s kind of the point I was going for — it’s borderline impossible to be so driven to become a historically great athlete without also picking up a whole bunch of personality or behavioral traits that are going to cause you problems in other areas.

I mean, Duncan *just* retired.

I thought about him, and your right, I probably undervalued him as a top 10 player, honestly.

I think there’s a difference between that and forcing a trade, calling out your FO, having TV special to announce your FA decision, bad mouthing or fighting teammates, getting in legal trouble, dating a Kardasian, getting a coach fired, complaining to the media. ...

Yeah, I was kind of disappointed that he said that. I think when athletes acknowledge that they care about how the talking heads assign them value, it’s just validates a lot of dumb, arbitrary arguments, as though the concept of “legacy” was an agreed-upon universal truth and we’re all talking about the same thing.

Gretzky did force a trade to LA to appease his actress wife ...

I don’t want to get into an argument about “legacy,” but I think there are solid arguments against any of those guys (is Jeter a top 5 *Yankee*?), but it’s really hard to keep Duncan out of the top 10.

Eh, I think there are guys who might be on some people’s top 10 lists — Dirk, David Robinson, Joe Montana, Unitas, Gehrig — but Duncan is pretty close to a consensus pick.

Fuck your anticipatory “well actually...”! :)

I’m not sure there are ton of absolute, top-10 all-time athletes in any sport who also weren’t huge drama queens.

Or rather it’s one of Gawker’s horcruxes.

lol - it’s early! He’s not making football decisions, he’s just helping to institute new processes and find inefficiencies!

“So many opportunities are missed in the NFL because people don’t want to do something different.”

I just didn’t want it to come across as “nuh uh, there’s 1 guy, so racism is dead!”