By Bob Markus

The college football season, my favorite season, has already kicked off, baseball is just beginning its sweet September song, and the New York Giants open defense of their Super bowl title in two days. So why am I still writing about the Olympics? Because I promised. And not being the presidential candidate for either party, I tend to keep my promises.

At the end of last week's column (I prefer to think of myself as a columnist rather than a bloggist), I had quoted Mark Spitz as saying that Michael Phelps, who had just eclipsed Spitz's record seven gold medals in Olympic swimming, was "maybe the greatest athlete of all time." No way, I responded, with the promise of explaining myself this week.

I remember years ago, when I was an embryo columnist for The Chicago Tribune, writing that Arnold Palmer could not be Athlete of the Year because golfer's weren't athletes. I had in mind the fact that there were pro golfers with their bellies hanging over their belts and others so skinny they could be mistaken for flag sticks. A few weeks later I happened to be sitting next to Palmer at a luncheon when he broached the subject, gently chiding me and explaining why I was wrong. He emphasized the intense focus required on every shot over a four-day period and the mental stress involved, the ability to perform under pressure.

Thinking it over, I now agree that golfers and race drivers and, yes, even swimmers, have a case for being acclaimed as Athletes of the Year. But that is a transitory honor, and I wouldn't be surprised if Phelps were to be named Male Athlete of the Year for 2008, even though I personally believe that Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt was the most gifted athlete of the Beijing Games.

But greatest athlete of all-time? That takes more than the ability to swim faster for a short distance than any one in the history of the known world. The Olympic motto is "swifter, higher, stronger," and, for me, you'd have to excel in at least two out of the three to even be considered the greatest athlete of all time.

So, if Phelps had also won gold in, say, the platform dive he could figure in this discussion. If Bolt had added the long jump title to his 100 and 200 meter victories, he could be in the mix. Carl Lewis won four consecutive golds in the long jump and another five in the 100 and 200 meter sprints. Jesse Owens won those same three events in the 1936 "Nazi Olympics." They'd both be on my ballot.

Traditionally, the winner of the Olympic decathlon is recognized as the world's best athlete, which makes sense, inasmuch as all three skills are involved in 10 events over two gruelling days. But, in part because NBC's TV coverage all but ignored track and field, the 2008 decathlon winner, Bryan Clay, has been mostly unappreciated, while earlier decathlon winners like Bob Mathias, Rafer Johnson, Bill Toomey, and Bruce Jenner all were lionized in their day. Legend has it that when King Gustav of Sweden gave Jim Thorpe his gold medal in the 1912 Stockholm Games, he declared, "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world."

He was right and not just because Thorpe had won both the pentathlon and decathlon in the same Olympics. Thorpe also was a Hall of Fame football player both as an amateur and a professional. He was a two-time All-America for the Carlisle Indian school, which won the national championship in 1912 after going 11-1 the previous year. In its championship season Carlisle beat Army 27-6 in a game in which Thorpe ran 92 yards for a touchdown on one play and 97 yards the next play when the first run was wiped out by a penalty.

After the Olympics, Thorpe played major league baseball for the New York Giants and Cincinnati Reds. In six years he played in 289 games, batting only .252 with seven home runs. As a baseball player he is best remembered for driving in the only run in the celebrated double no-hit game between Fred Toney and Hippo Vaughn, won by Toney's Reds, 1-0, in 10 innings.

He later played for the Canton Bulldogs in the fledgling National Football League and even barnstormed with an All-American Indian pro basketball team. All of which points to Thorpe as the greatest athlete ever. But, as my friend Lee Corso would say, "not so fast, my friend."
There is one other multi-talented athlete I would present for your consideration. My choice for greatest athlete ever is--the Babe.

No, not Babe Ruth, although had he not gone into the Hall of Fame as the greatest over-all hitter of all-time, he surely would have made it as a pitcher. In the three years in which he was a fulltime starting pitcher he had a 65-33 combined record (18-8, 23-12, 24-13) and in one season completed 35 of his 38 starts. His record of 29 2/3 scoreless innings in the world series, established in 1918, lasted until 1961. Ruth is the only one-sport performer I would even consider for the title World's Greatest Athlete.

The Babe I'm talking about is Babe Didrikson Zaharias. All-America in basketball. Winner of two gold medals and a silver in the 1932 Olympics. One of the top five women golfers--ever. Only woman to make the cut in a men's PGA tournament. And have I mentioned that she once barnstormed with the House of David baseball team, the only woman and the only beardless person on the team? The stuff of legends.

As a basketball player, Babe Didrikson led her AAU team to the 1931 national championship. In the 1932 AAU track championships, then the equivalent of the Olympic Trials, she entered eight events, won five of them, all in world record time, and tied for first in a sixth. The lone entrant for her team, she won the team championship all by herself.

Although she had qualified for the Olympics in six events, the rules of the time permitted her to compete in only three. She won gold in the javelin and 80 meters hurdles, then cleared the high jump at the same height as teammate Jean Shiley, but was awarded only the silver medal because of her head first style, not as readily accepted then as it became in the post Fosbury Flop era.

Then she reinvented herself. Took up a new sport. Took on a new name. Although she won an amateur golf tournament in 1932, she did not get serious about the game until 1935 when she took lessons from a pro for the first time. By then she had lost her amateur status because her name appeared in a car ad. She would get it back in 1943 and at one time won 17 straight amateur tournaments.

In the interim she would play--and fail to make the cut--in the 1938 Los Angeles Open. But she got a consolation prize. One of her playing partners was George Zaharias, a professional wrestler from Colorado known as "The Crying Greek from Cripple Creek." In less than a year they were married and, as Babe Zaharias, she would make the cut in three men's tournaments and take the golf world, women's division, by storm. A founding member of the LPGA, she won 41 LPGA events.

She won 10 of what at the time were major tournaments for women, four of them as an amateur. In 1950 she won all three of them. Her last victory in a major tournament came at the 1954 Women's U.S. Open, which she won only a month after surgery for the colon cancer that would kill her two years later. She was 45 when she died.

There have been athletes good enough in two sports to play and even star as professionals. None in my memory has dominated more sports than The Babe. As for Michael Phelps, congratulations for a job well done. See you in four years. Maybe by then you'll have added to your repertoire, taken up water polo or channel swimming, perhaps. Then we'll have this discussion again.