There is no content about ‘Muhammed Ali’, just Muhammad Ali.

Filed to: Muhammed Ali??

All three players I’ve mentioned had to retire in their prime due to injuries. Seles career also was derailed for at least 2 years due to this assault. Both Graf and Williams inadvertently benefitted from it. Why does this take away from one player’s success but not from the other? Both got lucky breaks from others…

We are playing what ifs, aren’t we? So let’s play. What if Hingis, Clijsters, Henin do not have to retire prematurely. Does Serena still win all those GS tournaments. Probably not.

Retirement due to injuries at 25, 26? Yeah, sure.

Great, so Seles would have continued to win while the other three retiring had no effect on Serenas’s winning record. Got that. You probably also believe, that Serena won SI sportsperson of the year b/c she was the most successful tennis player in 2015 and not this stupid dude from Serbia. It’s great to be ‘Murican.

eking out grand slam titles at a roughly linear pace for her entire career.

Martina Hingis won 5 GS tournaments and basically had to retire due to injuries at the age of 25. Henin won 7 GS and retired at the age of 27 and Clijsters effectively got out of the game with 4 GS wins at 27. Seles retired at age 30 with 9 GS wins and those others are pushovers for you? So Seles blocking Graf from…

It’s also safe to say that Graf would have taken a few more from the competition, had she not been continuously hampered by injuries. She retired at 29, b/c of injuries. These are all hypotheticals, we could continue to spin this without end.

No way Serena could have won 8 GS tournaments since 2011, without Clijsters and Henin retiring in their primes and Venus slowed down by her illness. She won 13 GS in the first 12 years (since she first won in 1999), then 8 GS wins in the last 4 years. So she was more sucessful while being past her physical prime then…

Thank you. You made a perfect case for both Graf and Navratilova.

You also know that Graf won 6 out of 8 GS tournaments in 95/96, missing the Aussi Open twice due to injuries. Is it far fetched to assume, that she might have won 2 back to back Grand Slams on top of her ‘Golden Slam’ in 1988 (calendar slam + Olympic gold medal)?

Both Hingis’ and Henin’s careers were cut short because of injuries, Sharapova had a debilitating shoulder injury and never regained her old strength. Kim Clijster retired before her time to have a family, even Venus Williams hasn’t been her old self for years b/c of her illness and you are going to tell me that Graf…

Lack of competition for Graf? When she started winning GS tournaments, she had to beat Evert and Navratilova, as well as Hana Mandlikova, all multiple GS winners. Her contemporaries were players like Seles, Sabatini, Sanchez, Pierce, Serena and Venus Williams, Davenport and Hingis (all of them multiple GS winners as…

You’re on a celebrity gossip site and yet, you “prefer to know as little as possible about the artists behind the art”?

I used the baseball example to point out, that jezebel *does* write about athletes every now and then, to counter any arguments that this was a deadspin topic exclusively. Maybe I came across a little too flippant.

Referencing to the Lucille Richards post was for all those who would have argued that jezebel is a gossip site and that I should go to deadspin for all things sport.

Putting Ali next to child pornographers and abusers in something called a ‘dirtbag’ is the belitteling part in all of this.

Why in a dirt bag, next to an indicted child pornography peddler, some celebrity nobodies who have split and a convicted domestic abuser?

I dunno, Ali’s death is buried in a dirtbag on jezebel, while the death of a woman who once played baseball for a hot minute gets its own post. They were both sports figures, one was one of the greatest athletes of all times, the other was well known to her family and friends. Guess who received a hero’s farewell on…