Eight Is Enough

The first sports talk radio show I listened to regularly (and willingly*) did a daily countdown of the top three players across all sports** by their uniform number. I am planning to do an updated/expanded list one day, but for now I'm going to list the eight greatest players to wear Number Eight across all major North American sports, for reasons that will become clear soon...

*fvck Mike Franceser

**this was an ESPN show, so "all" sports means "all sports that the host has passable knowledge about" although I became a loyal listener when Jari Kurri was mentioned.

To compile this list, I scrolled through every Sports Reference page under 'frivolities' and looked over each list of players who wore Eight - then I discarded any who wore a different number for a significant part of their careers. We're looking for True Eights here - which excludes Kobe Bryant.

I won't give you a list of 'just missed the cut' players, but I will say that soccer and basketball(both men's and women's) were considered. I'll defer to ESPNW for the greatest eight in WNBA annals, since there's no link to that league's uniform number tracker on basketball-reference.

Futbol was a tough one as well. There's no player-by-number list here, either. Understandable since soccer has so many worldwide leagues and nearly all of the players wear low numbers. Sportskeeda ranked the eight greatest eights in soccer nearly four years ago; Andres Iniesta was the top player they chose. I was unfamiliar with him before the 100 Greatest Athletes list but I had heard of the other top four players - Steven Gerrard, Hristo Stoichkov, and Lothar Matthaus.

There are no men's basketball players on this Top Eight list, either. When you see the names, you'll see why I couldn't justify adding Walt Bellamy or Antoine Walker.

Enough explaining...let's get to the eight greatest eights.

Hey.. that's a 9, not an 8!

Okay, I included "Pops" as an honorable mention, because this card was crucial to the origin story of this blog. I bought it ungraded for $1 on COMC, then had it slabbed and it suddenly transformed into a $150 card. None of my (mostly female) writing friends who read my previous blog would have understood... so I decided to share this and (several hundred) other thoughts with fellow collectors.

Got these cups at the last Red Sox game I attended.

A preview of the next A's series post

42 away from the record...

Cal might not be the best #8 strictly by the numbers, and if I were hosting that radio show today I'd rank him third, Selanne or Steve Young second, and Alex Ovechkin first. Then I'd count the seconds until I was bombarded by combative comments. Where's Yogi Berra, you idiot??!? What's a Teemu, anyway?  

Now for an announcement.. the theme of this post is a nod to my upcoming Eight Year anniversary blogging (primarily) about sports and sports trading cards. On at least two occasions I considered ending the blog or leaving indefinitely, but I'm still here. However I do plan to go dark after the completion of the Athletics series and revert this to a personal journal for a while.

But we're not there yet... there's another milestone post up next, and then three more about the Athletics. And maybe a couple more topics mixed in, before the curtain falls on The Collector.

Thanks for reading!




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