There is something about the spirit of our time that fuels seemingly constant discussions around the title “The Greatest of All Time” (aka The G.O.A.T.). Who started it, and why do we love this debate so?

One answer takes us back to the boxing and wrestling rings of the mid-20th century.

Muhammad Ali famously declared, “I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was.” But he was not the first to make this proclamation. Gorgeous George, the flamboyant 1940s and ’50s professional wrestler, commanded a king’s ransom from fans who came to see him lose.

Gorgeous George advised Ali, “A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth. So, keep on bragging, keep on sassing and always be outrageous.”

After Ali upset Sonny Liston for the Heavyweight Championship in 1964, the boast became his de facto trademark. Over two decades, fans paid to cheer on Ali in title fight after title fight—even as Joe Frazier, Kenny Norton, and George Foreman exacted their pound of flesh—and whether he won or lost, well or badly, the moniker of “The Greatest” somehow stuck, even to this day.

Today, “The Greatest” has become “G.O.A.T.” Rapper LL Cool J coined the acronym in its eponymous 2000 album, which debuted at the top of the U.S. Billboard 200.

Ever since, the crown of all-time greatness has been the topic of the zeitgeist—particularly among elite athletes comparing themselves (always favorably) with those who came before.

Today, amidst a growing crowd of G.O.A.T.s of one kind or another, flaunting Olympic gold medals, Super Bowl championships, and golf tour green jackets, LeBron James most emphatically claims the crown—even wearing one occasionally (his nickname has been King James for 20 years now). Despite protests from Michael Jordan and fans, LeBron might very well be the NBA’s greatest of all time, with a host of metrics to back up the claim. And LeBron himself has said, on multiple occasions, that he believes he is the best athlete to have played the game. But does a self-coronation make it so? Uneasy lies the head that not only wears the crown but feels the need to remind us all.

And yet, it always has been thus. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles was the G.O.A.T.—not simply for his prowess on the battlefield, but for selling an image of himself as unbeatable. In the 10th year of the Trojan War, Achilles publicly tested the G.O.A.T. appellation. He sat out the fight in a combination fit of pique and lesson to his fellow Greeks, as if to say, “Just try winning this thing without me.” They couldn’t, and he obtained living legend status when they paid him public obeisance in return for killing Hector and winning the war.

But the gods were not amused, and the telltale Achilles’ heel may have been more than the tendon at the ankle where the god Apollo struck him with an arrow. Achilles’ death was comeuppance for his self-conscious moodiness and blowhard self-love.

As Gorgeous George knew only too well, G.O.A.T.s are often not fan favorites. There is a special schadenfreude for those who fly too near the sun. The concept of hubris—the deadly cocktail of overconfidence and arrogance—finds its way into tragedies, then and now.

Hippolytus, in the famous play by Euripides, is an elite athlete, renowned not only for his hunting prowess but his extreme physical beauty. Not surprisingly, he is also a bit infamous for being a prig, self-righteous and aloof. Cultishly, he aligns himself with the virgin huntress goddess Artemis, placing him at odds with Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation. Using his smug superiority against him, she causes a series of events leading to his ignominious death, literally crushing his beautiful body under the wheels of his own chariot.

I thought a lot about that Euripides play while watching the late Kobe Bryant during the mid-2000s—the hard years that followed his first three world championships with the Lakers, and included massive off-court problems, most notably a sexual assault case.

Fans, journalists, and more than a few peers seemed to be wishing him the worst, celebrating him slipping on the banana peel of hubris and being crushed under the wheel of his own design.

Yet Kobe found a way back to all-time greatness—not just on the basketball court, where his play never faltered, but in family life, public esteem, and even in Hollywood, winning an Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2018. How did he do it?

By humbling himself, privately and publicly—with his wife, who stayed married to him, and with his acceptance of vitriol from the press and fans alike. The marriage held, and eventually the championships returned to Los Angeles, highlighted by the Lakers beating their hated rivals the Boston Celtics.

The losses along the way humanized Kobe and made his triumphs less godlike and more human. Indeed, this is something we look for in heroes, and G.O.A.T.s—the ability to turn difficulty, even tragedy, into learning and progress. We see it in Simone Biles’ 2020 Olympic Games struggles, or in Serena Williams’ late-career struggles with injuries and returns to form, or the mental health challenges of Naomi Osaka or Michael Phelps.

Why? Because we want to see ourselves in them, since we and the G.O.A.T.s are all—presumably—human. I’d like to believe that each of us has at least one moment’s greatness, an instant of superhuman strength, unexpected courage, grit, or determination, matched only by the luck of that once-in-a-lifetime set of space/time circumstances falling into place in a precise moment of Zen.

When LeBron and Tom Brady declare themselves the greatest of all time, they separate themselves not only from Michael Jordan or Joe Montana but from us. There should be a separation, of course. They are great in their chosen fields in ways that we can only dream about. But they are living and breathing and losing alongside us, their fellow humans, even as they argue the case for their all-time winning immortality.

When I hear G.O.A.T. talk, I’m reminded of Greek mythology, yes, but also of Peter Pan. By refusing to admit loss, you never really grow up. Time never passes. You are the greatest now, and forever.

But the world doesn’t really work like that.

Greatness is momentary, even for the G.O.A.T.s of the world. And the fact that greatness is momentary is precisely why it should be appreciated in all its forms.

Rather than crowns or self-proclamations and the cults that they engender, perhaps another all-time great human, the children’s TV host Fred Rogers, provides the truest metric of greatness for us all: “Being the best loser takes talent, just as being the best winner does.”

If there is a postscript, it’s that the gods of sport are fickle, to say the least. Being a self-proclaimed G.O.A.T. did not spare LeBron’s Lakers from being swept this postseason by the Denver Nuggets (who in Nikola Jokić have their own G.O.A.T. candidate). Failure and loss are part of living a human life, and despite the huckstering and hyperbole, G.O.A.T.s are human.

Watching LeBron’s postgame press conference after the Lakers defeat, what he said revealed less than the gestural power of his immense human frame over the course of the Q&A: at first combative and clipped, then gradually relaxing his shoulders as he reminisced about his team and family, even finding a way to smile. Hopefully G.O.A.T.s-to-be in all sports will take notice: This was greatness on display.

The post Why We Love the Great G.O.A.T. Debate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a popular retelling of the myth goes, Persephone is picking flowers with her friends near a lake when suddenly the earth splits open and Hades, in his golden chariot, emerges and snatches her away, ferrying her down to the underworld, where she becomes his unwilling queen. Sensing something amiss, Persephone’s mother, Demeter, calls her daughter’s name, but to no avail. She only finds scattered petals floating on the lake’s surface. Raging across the Earth in her search of her daughter, the goddess brings the first winter to mankind as punishment for Persephone’s disappearance. Zeus, ultimately realizing that the world will perish if Demeter doesn’t get her daughter back, eventually returns Persephone to her mother. But because Persephone mistakenly ate four pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld, she must return to Hades for a third of every year, forever.

The story of Persephone is used to explain the cycle of the seasons. Fall and winter each year is understood to be the time when Persephone descends into the underworld, and the emergence of spring and summer signals her return to her mother and the world of the living. But the story is also about motherhood and the necessary pain of letting a child go so that she can fully become herself. You could argue this process begins the second a child is born, as being born is the first real separation from the mother, the first rupture that informs the many ruptures and subsequent repairs in the mother-child relationship.

A wise friend reminded me of this soon after I gave birth to my daughter, Lucia. We need to prepare ourselves to let them go, she said, so they can leave and forge their own paths. This, my friend argued, is the true work of motherhood. Our children are only guests in our houses. “It’s like holding a baby bird,” she told me. “Too tight and you crush her. Not close enough and she flies away too soon, unprotected. Hold her with the knowledge of future flight.”

I thought about her words as I soaked up listless afternoons singing to my baby, pacing the bedroom and rocking her in my arms while I stared out at the palm trees and the flat blue line of ocean, the amniotic feeling of oneness coursing between us, as if we were still intertwined by blood and fluid, multiplying cells and placental tissue. It seemed impossible that Lucia would grow up and separate from me, leading a life that didn’t necessarily include me, the Persephone to my Demeter. But who knew, she might even shun everything that I had taught her.

Having Lucia made me more aware of how the myth of Demeter and Persephone had informed my relationship with my own mother. My parents divorced when I was 7, and afterward, I ping-ponged back and forth between their houses. On Sunday nights, I would pack up my duffle to be reunited with my mother after a week apart, or to leave her again. The persistent cycle of rupture and reunification put me on familiar terms with the pain of maternal separation. I was always highly aware of my own distress over my living arrangements. Now a mother myself, I could more fully imagine my own mother’s heartache as she became Demeter, the grieving mother, who had to let her daughter go every week, forever.

But my mother’s devotion to herself, and to her own professional and spiritual path, also primed me to not abandon my own years of study and work. When Lucia was born, I was in the middle of my graduate studies, with coursework, a looming dissertation, and an unfinished novel hanging in the balance. My mother had always told me to finish my Ph.D., no matter what. But six weeks after giving birth, I didn’t know if I would ever write again; I remember telling my academic advisor that I feared motherhood had swallowed me whole. You will write again, she told me calmly, just give it time.

It took about four more months for me to come around, and realize that I wanted—and needed—to return to my studies. I found a babysitter to watch my daughter. The woman smelled of starch and talked too much, and Lucia wailed the minute she picked her up, but eventually calmed. I got into my car that first morning with still-wet hair, determined to drive to work, determined to leave behind those yawning days of closeness, with all of their intensity and boredom, just for a handful of hours. I repeated under my breath: The baby is a guest in my house; she’s a guest in my house.

I gripped the steering wheel, for a time unable to actually drive away, unable to move, so overcome with guilt and longing for my daughter, overcome by the separation that was occurring then, and by all the future separations we would endure to fully become ourselves. But I did it. I drove away—that day, and the day after, and the day after that, until the pain dulled and became routine, until it became part of me. The sight of my daughter happy, clean, and well-fed greeted me upon my return at the end of each day, and I held her again, inhaled her milky soapy scent, my heart contracting, knowing no greater relief than this.

I poured all the pain, guilt and fear tangled up in our daily partings into a novel—the tale of a mother separated from her daughter by war, who rages, grieves, and searches for her daughter amid the ruins of postwar France. I heard my mother’s voice, telling me to keep writing, to keep going, that separating from the all-encompassing demands of domesticity was imperative to creating art.

Lucia is 10 now, and I also have a son who is eight. My book is completed and published. But I will never forget the pain of that initial separation, and all the subsequent ones that followed. Our family has been pushed together again these last 14 months, trapped in the enforced closeness of COVID-19, with its lack of normal boundaries and separations. This time together has been a joyful gift, but it’s also been a strange suffocation. It has been infantilizing for my children to be tucked so tightly under my wing again, as I anxiously monitor their every move, from school Zoom meetings to walks around the block. It is time, again, to step away.

Recently, just after her 10th birthday, Lucia put her arms around me and announced that she was really going to miss me. She said this with a knowing sadness, as though her leaving was inevitable and imminent. “When I’m a teenager, which is just a few years away, I’m moving into my own apartment,” she said, a glimmer of mischief and delight in her eye. We joked about it, and I held her tight. I envisioned her tearing down the Pacific Coast Highway on a Harley, desperate to cross the border into adulthood while I raced after her on my own motorcycle, determined to stay in her rearview mirror, wherever she went.

Sometimes I fantasize that I will keep Lucia close, like the mother in the children’s book Runaway Bunny, who vows to follow her baby bunny no matter how far afield the baby bunny tries to go. But I also hope that I will release her into the world with the same confidence and trust my own mother offered to me. Of course Lucia is dreaming of escape. We all are. This past year was stolen from her, and from all our children. Her world became as small as a pomegranate seed; its seasons, disrupted. The winter when Persephone separates from her mother, descending into the underworld where she discovers her own autonomy, evaporated into a seemingly eternal quarantine summer of togetherness without reprieve.

After 13 months sequestered at home, my children finally returned to in-person school last week. Because the virus is still a threat and classrooms can’t be full, it’s a hybrid setup. We separate for three hours each morning and then come back together again.

It felt strange that first morning to drop them off and watch them disappear into their classrooms, echoing that morning long ago when I first left Lucia in the care of someone else, crying in my car, white-knuckling the steering wheel. But as I stood on the empty school lawn, I realized that we’ve always been doing this, like Demeter and Persephone, and we will continue to do this: letting each other go so we can come back together again.

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