Move over Roger Bannister, Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, Dwyane Wade in da house

Guy -- in your own words give us 5 reasons why Wade should be SI Sportsmen of the year?

 

I agree. That's just plain silly. This is our field and we should strive for excellence, no less than people at Time should strive for excellence or people operating on brains should strive for excellence or, hell, people waiting on me at Applebee's should strive for it, as well. You can trivialize anything if you really want to. Hell, Samuel Beckett won a Nobel Prize for literature by essentially spending his career trivializing life itself. I imagine that the people who cover Congress have the same, "What am I doing with my life?" and "Is this all there is?" moments that we do. It's not that we think sports are the most important thing in the world, but our customers care about them a great deal, and it's our obligation to them to cover them as thoughtfully and thoroughly as possible.

 

Boom, I didn't say he should be the Sportsman of the Year, I'm just saying I think they could have done a lot worse.
But, if i had to make an argument for him, I'd say he has helped the NBA overcome the image problem it had 5 years ago in the vacuum left after Jordan's second retirement (but before the third).
Who was the posterboy back in '01? Iverson, in all his brilliant but tatted up glory.
He's helped usher in with the help of the rules changes the kind elegant, athletic game that a lot of posters on the board say used to love watching when they grew up in the 80s.
He embraces the fact that he's a role model.
He did win a championship, and manages to coexist peacefully along with the other superstars on his team, one of whom is his coach. That doesn't happen a lot, particularly in the NBA.

Did he cure cancer? No. He didn't even cure Lupus (as House said a couple weeks ago, "it's never Lupus anyway).

I think the ATHLETE of the year, as I said earlier in the thread, should be Federer.

But I think there are posters that are taking this way too seriously, as if the criteria should be higher. Maybe it should. Why couldn't it be Mutombo? Or Magic Johnson? I don't know, that's a better question for the editors.

But I don't think they picked Wade to simply sell magazines.

I was simply saying if you look at the list through the years, there are certainly some names that surprise you.

Like, for example, Carl Ripken Jr., whom apparently looks an awful lot like CAL Ripken Jr. Whoops. I spend a couple posts defending the magazine, then they screw up the name of my favorite baseball players a kid. Thanks guys.

 

Joey Cheek, won an Olympic Gold medal, donated his $40K in USOC bonuses to Right To Play, an athlete-driven international humanitarian organization formed by former Olympic champion Johann Olav Koss of Norway. Joey challenged others to make similar pledges to Right To Play. He attends Princeton U.
That's the definition of Sportsman of the Year.

 

Finally... a guy who should have gotten it over Wade.

Great grab, abb.

 

What you are saying is that Dwayne Wade is honored for being normal.

We are in an era of athletics where being normal stands out.

 

You deny that?

 

Good stuff abbot. But didn't D-Wade win a bronze medal this year at the World Championship? That was impressive!

 

Mr behindtheguy,

Actually, Koss was one of the most enlightened choices SI has made.

YHS, etc

 

Not disputing Mr. Koss' achievements and donations to society at large. Though I'd wager more than half the people that saw the magazine in '94 said, who's that guy standing next to Bonnie Blair?

It just seems that the posters are waiting for some sort of Christ-figure to emerge from out of they sky and grace SI with his presence. It wasn't going to happen this year. Let's move on.