Doctor MJ wrote:HeartBreakKid wrote:falcolombardi wrote:from more to less, how would sports be rsnked by how much nostalgia and preference for older eras they have?
i feel like basketball and boxing would be on top and maybe soccer at the bottom
No one in basketball really matters before Magic and Bird which wasn't that long ago, and no one else during the 80s really matters either except guys who had success during the 90s.
Basketball's nostalgia doesn't go that far back because ironically most people weren't watching basketball a long time ago. Always got to laugh when a guy says "you probably were too young to see them play" and they're talking about 2005 players or something.
I'd say baseball is king of nostalgia.
Just want to specifically note that I think Wilt Chamberlain is the extra dimension here that has to be mentioned.
Y'all know that when it comes to player comparison stuff, I'm very much in the Russell>Wilt camp. But as much as I admire Russell on and off the court, I can't deny that Wilt isn't simply the #1 pre-Bird/Magic icon the sport produced, he's someone who (literally) stands out enough that people knew and know him who might never have watched a basketball game.
He was essentially seen as the super-man. More than any other athlete. That's why people still tell tales about him, and that's why we have people earnestly believe many of these tales even in hard core communities such as RealGM.
All this to say that I'd argue it's essentially because of Wilt that basketball conversations that go back to the '60s have remained fairly common, while stuff from the '50s and earlier are much less frequent, and this type of split between the '50s & '60s certainly was no given. (For baseball, by contrast, the '50s - and the '20s before that - represent the most significant decades.)
Sure, people know players before Magic/Bird (Dr.J, Chamberlain, Kareem) but they're more after thoughts. Kareem and Dr.J playing in the 80s did help their obscurity issues.
Chamberlain is reasonably popular relative to his era, but not as popular as someone like Dr.J. They still seem like two guys who's reputations would have took a massive leap if they had done what they had done later.
Regardless, with Chamberlain you still very much hear the "didn't he play against 5'9 guys?" quite often so his era is certainly used against him. It seems like people like to draw a line in terms of competition with Magic and Bird, using a clumsy false pretext that "oh, they had the 3 pointline, that's why it's modern" - even though it's really an obvious excuse just to find a convenient way to cut pre 80s guys out as that would require more thinking and research to rank them.