GOT YOUR NUMBER

A sportscaster decides which players own the numbers from one to 100.

Along with his longtime producer, Hembekides, ESPN stalwart Greenberg loves a good debate. He’s going to get them from readers after selecting not so much the 100 most accomplished players in sports history, but those whose exploits secured “ownership” of each number—e.g., Babe Ruth with No. 3 or Tom Brady with No. 12. In most cases, it’s about the men and women who wore the numbers, but other digits are awarded to such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams, representing their total victories, winning streaks, or years they dominated. It's a fun, entertaining, and totally subjective book, but Greenberg’s hyperbole and smug certitude get tiresome, as they do on his radio show. Sports fans will concur with many of his selections but disagree vehemently with others. “Wayne Gretzky is the greatest athlete in the history of North American team sports,” he writes, and golf is “the greatest game ever invented.” Even for a book about superlatives, there is an eye-rolling excess of “greatest ever,” “best who ever lived,” and similar effusions. Greenberg allows his enthusiasms to run away with him, with a breathless writing style that grates after a few pages. Sometimes he contradicts himself: “Tom Brady is the greatest football player that has ever lived,” he writes; 50 pages later, he anoints Jim Brown as “the best football player that ever lived.” Greenberg tries to hedge, contrasting “best” versus “greatest,” but this sort of splitting of hairs doesn’t cut it. One of the author’s favorite phrases is, “there is no doubt.” Readers, however, will find plenty to doubt in these pages, and the author fails to provide enough contextual information to back up his choices.

Credit Greenberg for assembling a deluge of fascinating statistics. Bench him for hyperextended prose.