There may have been some–a very few–who were better than these, but none had greater impact on how their games were played. Along with Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Pele, these were the people who shaped the century in sports –By Daniel Okrent BABE RUTH In sports’ first golden age, there was Babe Ruth–and then there was everyone else. In 1920, only his second season as an everyday player, he hit 54 home runs–more than any entire team in the American League. Within a few years, his assault on distant fences had bent baseball into a new and thrilling shape. His appetites were as prodigious as his home runs, his affinity for the crowd and the camera seemingly part of his dna. By the time he retired in 1935, Ruth had become, in the words of sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, “a national heirloom,” a gift from one generation to the next, a treasure from an earlier time. BOBBY JONES He was the embodiment of the true sportsman, a modest fellow whose noble consideration for his opponents was equaled only by the cruel ease with which he vanquished them. Jones won an unprecedented 13 major golf championships in a brief seven years, culminating in his 1930 sweep of all four majors, the only Grand Slam in the game’s history. And then, still an amateur and determined to remain one, he retired, at 28. From that day forward, Jones played competitively only once a year–at the tournament he invented on the course he co-designed: the Masters at Augusta National. JACQUES PLANTE Gordie Howe was great, Bobby Orr greater, Wayne Gretzky the greatest–yet none altered the course of hockey quite so much as the piece of molded fiberglass that Jacques Plante affixed to his head on Nov. 1, 1959. Already the dominant goaltender of his era, Plante could now venture out from his circumscribed piece of ice in front of the Montreal net, there to face down without flinching the bullet shots of the league’s best shooters. After Plante, hockey’s goalies–virtually all of them masked by 1970–would display a new boldness, a more aggressive posture, a more intimate role in the currents of the game. And more teeth too. JESSE OWENS For one brief moment, he was white America’s first black athletic hero, his four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics both a garland of honor for the U.S. and a mortification to Hitler. Within months, though, even with medals on his bureau and his degree from Ohio State in one of its drawers, he was able to support himself only by racing against horses as a sort of sideshow at Negro League baseball games. To TIME, he was variously the “coffee-colored” Owens, “the world’s fastest blackamoor” or “the dusky speedster.” But to Jackie Robinson and millions of other black Americans, he was inspiration and paladin, a sign of things to come. VINCE LOMBARDI He was the essence of coach, this gruff, gap-toothed tyrant-with-a-heart-of-gold who forged championships–five in seven seasons–not from brilliant constellations of X’s and O’s but from his total commitment to the concept of a team. The Packers “didn’t do it for individual glory,” Lombardi once said. “They did it because they loved one another.” Maybe so–but Green Bay lineman Jerry Kramer saw it differently: “The difference between being a good football team and a great football team,” he wrote of Lombardi, “was only him.”
