Columnist Dean Juipe: Woods adds to best-ever argument

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

Meticulously disposing of the remaining challengers Sunday in the PGA Championship, Tiger Woods once again stoked a fire fervently tended by his most ardent admirers.

They say he is the greatest player in the history of the sport and that comparisons with any other player -- i.e., Jack Nicklaus in particular -- have to credit Woods with competing at a time when talent is worldly and widespread, and that there are more superb players than ever.

It can be a convincing argument, albeit one that can also be applied across the board to every sport.

Pete Sampras' supporters can claim that he is the finest player tennis has ever known.

Likewise, the recently retired Wayne Gretzky is hailed by many as hockey's best ever, just as Michael Jordan stepped away from basketball a year ago to similar accolades.

If younger fans are to be believed, Mark McGwire is en route to supplanting Babe Ruth as baseball's all-time best player, while overly euphoric boxing fans put their trust in Oscar De La Hoya (or Felix Trinidad or Roy Jones) as a man capable of pushing Rocky Marciano off his informal throne.

Along the same lines, John Elway's penchant for late-game heroics (as well as two Super Bowl championships) had his backers dismissing comparisons to past greats like Johnny Unitas as if it were simply chatter.

Have we come to the absolute golden era of sports, where everything is better than what preceded it and every participant theoretically capable of besting anyone who came before?

In some respects, yes.

Technologic advancements in products like golf clubs and tennis rackets skewer comparative efforts to the past, and improvements in nourishment and a better understanding of physiology -- to say nothing of a greater emphasis on sports -- have led to athletes who are progressively bigger and stronger than their predecessors.

Yet there has to be a cap on sports technology and, even more likely, the human body. Will every athlete 50 years from now stand 7-foot tall and have unlimited dexterity?

If that does become the case, what we're seeing and reacting so favorably to in this generation will be long since forgotten -- or at least rendered trite -- by then.

That disparaging possibility aside, it is, as Tom Petty states in a recent song, "good to be king, no matter what it pays." And today's bumper crop of athletes are, if nothing else, effectively rewriting perspectives if not history itself.

What they're proving is that the past can sometimes be reduced to meaningless numbers. Take the Woods vs. Nicklaus comparison: Jack won 70 times on the PGA Tour and 24 times in other international events, a record Tiger has absolutely no chance of matching. Likewise, Nicklaus' total of 12 victories in major tournaments isn't apt to be threatened by Woods, who now has two.

But would you bet against Woods, who hits the ball farther and more accurately than anyone who has ever played, in a fanciful head-to-head pairing with Nicklaus? For that matter, wouldn't David Duval -- Woods' current rival -- likely defeat Nicklaus on physical prowess alone?

The past is what it is: a guide to the present.

But there will never be another Gordie Howe.

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