William the Marshall… the Greatest Of All Time (Athlete and Sportsman)

(This is a bit of tongue in cheek fun, but I wanted to sneer a the idea that the world’s best athlete ‘obviously’ has to have been around within living memory… what self satisfied twaddle.)

The Australian newspaper is having fun at the moment with a debate over who should be calledthe  GOAT – Greatest of All Time – of professional athletes.

As with most such polls, it concetnrates almost exculsively on people from the last century, and mostly from the last 40 or 50 years, and completely fails to consider anyone not in those narrow bounds.

The current top 10 list includes:

Michael Jordan

Don Bradman

Muhammed Ali

Pele

Serena Williams

Usain Bolt

Roger Federer

Tiger Woods

Jack Nicklaus

Babe Ruth

Now Don Bradman I can almost understand. Cricket is one of only a few genuine world sports (soccer being the only better standout). They are both played as ‘national sports’ by countries ammassing up to a third of the world’s population. Those two games are also played by people of all classes from a wide variety of cultures, from the playing fields of Eton to the slums of Bombay. And Bradman has a genuine claim to top his game, being statistically about 50% better in his record as a batsman than his next nearest competitor from any period… a percentage advantage no one else on the list could come close to in their sports.

In fact my problem with much of the rest of the list, is the paucity of competition within those sports. Baseball is basically still an American sport, and can’t be considered a proper world game. Who else plays it seriously? Japan and South Korea I think… Of the other place the American have conquored and occupied in the last century I don’t think Afghanistan is any more likely to adopt it as their national sport than Germany? 

Tennis and particularly golf are even worse. The words ‘pretentious middle class games’ spring to mind, and it is hard to take them seriously as competitive sports, no matter how much money some of those people have made. Even in the countries that do play them, only a fraction of the population would ever get involved. They will never be ‘national sports’ anywhere.

When I present to school groups on where the Olympic Games came from, I always get the students to nominate which were the original competitive sports. Usually they come up with boxing, wrestling, javelin, athletics, and perhaps discuss or shotput. They also tend to identify swimming and horseriding, which weren’t original olympic sports, but certainly fit the pattern of proper ruling class sports in an age of warrior cultures… who can run, jump, hit, and shoot, harder and more successfully… Real competitive sport began, in all cultures, with warrior games… not with dancing.

When asked to identify modern additons to the Olympics that the Greek military aristocracy would probably be happy with, they identify shooting (even the ski and shoot version), fencing, judo, even wightlifting etc.

When asked to identify what the Greeks would think is ridiculous about modern Olympics, they focus on the completely unnacceptable… rhythmic gymnastics (the ribbon and ball stuff), beach volleball, table tennis and sychronised swimming! Sports? Games?

But some of them also identify that the Greeks would have thought that any team sport is irrelevant… (paritcularly sports like basketball and baseball which have only been shoved in to the modern Olympics to give the Americans more medals). Again I note that soccer or cricket would be far more acceptable additions.. if any team sport could be considered acceptable… which they probably can’t.

So I note that although Pele and Bradman and Jordan might stand out from the crowd in their team sports, they and Babe Ruth are awarded points for being the ‘hitters’ in a group game… You can’t actually imagine the goalie or shortstop ever being nominated as GOAT, despite the fact that the above 4 ‘stars’ would have got nowhere without powerful teamwork required to support them. 

So having written off the pretentious middle class ‘game players’, and everyone in the team sports. What it left?

One of the writers in the Australian – Will Swanton -  notes that on pure winning grounds Pakistan squash player Jahangir Khan, with 555 wins in a row, would outshine everyone on pure results. (Who? What sport? Pretentious middle class anyone?) I am sure he is better than Michael Jordan at his limited exposure little game, but I can’t take either of them seriously as a GOAT athlete.

Muhammed Ali and Usain Bolt are the only ones left. One a truly worthy fighter, with a possibly unsurpassed record, and a reputation for competitiveness that apparently makes him an outstanding joy to watch. The other a short term freak of performance, who has briefly held a few world records (but at least in one of the proper olymic showman event… though Michale Phelps can claim the same…)

So here’s my candidate.

William the Marshall is almost universally recognised as ‘the best knight that ever lived’, by all those who consider his extraordinary career as a fighter, warrior, war leader, political leader, guardian, and shining light of courlty and knightly achievements at the height of the chivalric and troubadouring shift (that moved culture from adoring thugs who hit hard, to adoring all round ‘renaissance men’ who could dance, sing, write poetry, play chess, fight, and negotiate treaties that bought peace to generations). He was one of the men whom the word ‘paragon’  - a person or thing regarded as a perfect example of a particular quality - was invented for.

But he was also the GOAT athlete and sportsman.

Tournament fighting and jousting were the Olympic Games of the medieval world, and – far from being an elitist sport, or an act of middle class pretention – tournament fighting in both it’s foot and horseback forms is a sport common to all classes from all cultures throughout most of human history… From the Olympics and Gladiatorial combats, to the foot combat of Fencing and Kendo and Judo, to the horse archery of most of the nomadic tribes of Asia and Africa and even the American Indians: combat games are virtually the only universal human sport there has ever been.

William the Marshall was competing at a sport – armed combat – that is universal, worldwide, and largely classless. Admittedly he was competing at the most elite level (only the Sumarai or Persian or Eastern Roman Cataphracts really come close ot European kinghts for an equivalent dedication to a lifetime of training and specialist equipment and expense). But you can confidently say that here was a sport whose experts could face any other expert in any other combat sport in the world without confusion or fear.

And you could confidently predict that William the Marshall could defeat the equivalent character in any of those other combat sports… (As he apparently did when he fouht Muslim horse archers or Mameluke foot soldiers in his brief years on crusades.) 

As a man whose prowess in his chosen field could adapt to all equivalent fields, he certainly outranks Muhammed Ali: who is the closest competitor on the above list to a world class showman and rough and tumble performer for the crowds.

As a person who statistically outperformed even Donald Bradman in comparison to his competition. He comes out in front there too.

As a winner above all others – his deathbed comment that he had bested more than 500 knights in hs career from all over Europe and the Middle East is not something that a squash player with 555 wins is likely to compare.

And as an athletic freak, even Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps – with their scant decade or so of dominance, could dream of competing with.

William the Marshall won his first international class tournaments in his teens, and was still winning them in his 60’s. His unsurpassed competitiveness lasted not a few years, but several decades. He beat the GRANDCHILDREN of his previous conquests. And did so in a deadly serious full contact sport, not a namby pamby game like tennis or golf!

Even in terms of prize money, the modern ‘sports stars’ who make tens or hundreds of millions in their life are put to shame. In a period where defeated opponents in tournament had to pay ransoms… perhaps the equivalent of a war horse or a suit of armour (read nice Ferrari or Porsche for cost comparison)… William often defeated a dozen opponents in an afternoon. On the battlefield the ransom could be immeasurable greater, and in some case might bankrupt nation states like England and France when the king was captured.

Some estimates suggest that William the Marshall’s winnings over his career would properly translate into the billions today. Let alone the fact that his mastery of his trade got him the ultimate prize, the grant of the hand in marriage of one of the greatest heiresses in Europe…. Whose estates across England, Wales, Ireland and France easily outclassed all but a half dozen European kingdoms at the time. Williams prize money over his career are more comparable to a major nation states’ GDP, than to some golfers private jet.

Finally there is sheer class. William the Marshall was SO dominant in his sport, that just one of the hundreds of unbelievable anecdotes about his career should put him above the list of parochial competitors above.

As a loyal follower of Henry II, William was a bit vexed when Henry’s unruly son the Count of Poitou  – later to be known as King Richard the Lionheart – tried to revolt against his father. The next time they met in a (real war ) skirmish, Richard – who was never defeated by any other knight or warrior in his long career – was so easily overcome that William made a point of killing his horse in a clear statement of who he might have chosen to kill instead. Richard later had the grace and humility to welcome William to his service, and to entrust him with the vital safegaurding of the kingdom while Richared himself went on crusades..

Both of them behaving not only as world class athletes, but world class sportsmen.

When it comes to choosing an athlete whose range of ability, breadth of achievement, longevity of competitiveness, and unsurpassed affect on his entire peergroup, cannot be equalled (let alone surpassed by any of the people on the above list): then there is only one choice.

Wiliam the Marshall was the Greatest Of All Time.