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SportsCentury
Update
NEW YORK (AQB)--ESPN continues its countdown of the century's 100 greatest North American athletes with track legend Jesse Owens No. 6 and hockey great Wayne Gretzky No. 5. ESPN will document the lives and careers of the two greats in separate half-hour programs, beginning with Owens at 10 p.m. Friday and then Gretzky at 10:30 p.m. The program on Owens, the highest-ranked track and field star on the SportsCentury list, will address the racial tension he faced before and after the 1936 Olympics and his controversial stand against the Black Power movement at the 1968 Olympics. On the show, Owens biographer William Baker says, "The story of Jesse Owens is the story of the American dream. If America didn't have a Jesse Owens, we would have to create him." Owens won four gold medals (100 meters, 200 meters, four by 100 meter relay and the long jump) at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, forever damaging the "Aryan supremacy" trumpeted at the time by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In winning the four medals, Owens broke Olympic records nine times and equaled them twice. A year earlier, in a feat almost as amazing, the Ohio State track star broke five world records and tied a sixth in less than an hour at the Big Ten Championships. The show on Gretzky, the highest-ranked hockey player on the list, will address the pressures of being a young star, the impact he had on American hockey and how difficult it was for him to retire. On the show, former teammate Mark Messier says, "He basically took the league on his shoulders and carried them to a place that nobody 20 years ago would have ever thought hockey would be right now."
Gretzky, a four-time Stanley Cup winner, is the all-time NHL leader in points, goals and assists. The Great One won the NHL scoring championship 10 times and the NHL Most Valuable Player award nine times. He became the first hockey player to break the 200-point mark in a season, which he accomplished four times, and his record of 92 goals in one regular season may never be broken. Click to see the complete SportsCentury list so far, facts and trivia about the list, and all the voters and their descriptions. ESPN2 will close the year with a SportsCentury marathon - all 49 greatest athlete programs during the last two days of 1999. The network will present consecutive programs highlighting athletes 50 through 43 on Dec. 30 from 7:30 to 11:30 p.m. The programs will resume on Friday, Dec. 31 with athletes 42 through 9 from 1 a.m. to 6 p.m. back-to-back. The final eight athletes will be profiled consecutively from 8 p.m. through midnight (the start of the new century) with the hour-long program on the top two athletes from 11 p.m. to midnight. Also, compare SportsCentury's list to the top 20 of sports historian Bert Sugar (author of The Sports 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Athletes of All Time) from an old AQB Media Notes. In September, ESPN released a hard-cover SportsCentury book, recapping the past 100 years in sports and featuring essays from top authors on the greatest athletes of the century. Click here to read AQB's review of the book. Also, check out AQB's interview with Mark Shapiro, head of the SportsCentury project. In the 25-minute exclusive interview, which you can hear in its entirety or read portions of, Shapiro answers criticisms about the SportsCentury list and project, provides the names of the only two people who know who No. 1 is and explains how the voters were chosen. Below, you can find links to all the stories ArmchairQB.com has done on the SportsCentury project. Here is the complete list of AQB's stories on the SportsCentury project.
SportsCentury logo courtesy of ESPN.com |
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