ESPN's Faulty List.

• Author: McKissack, Fred

I decided to wait until after the New Year's celebrations before commenting on the worst of the "Best of" lists: ESPN's top 100 athletes.

I like ESPN, and my life has been greatly enhanced by twenty-four-hour-a-day sports coverage. But how could they, along with a batch of experts, name Michael Jordan the Athlete of the Century when Jackie Robinson has done more for the country as a whole than any athlete on the list?

I am not here to dis Jordan's skill. He made many of us rethink the idea of unassisted human flight. Other than Julius "Dr. J" Erving, there is no other player I know of who could turn a slam dunk into an event. And if you have any doubt as to who kept the NBA alive after Magic Johnson and Larry Bird left the scene, check out the ho-hum feel of the league after His Airness retired to the golf course.

But--and I guess this is a dis--what did Jordan do off the court to really further humanity? All those Nike commercials didn't advance a single social cause. And given Nike's record of exploiting workers in Asian sweatshops, Jordan's role as a pitchman began to reek. He appeared to be a man without a conscience. His most memorable comment on political matters came when he was asked why he didn't endorse Harvey Gantt, the African American Democrat who ran against racist Republican Senator Jesse Helms in Jordan's home state of North Carolina: "Republicans buy shoes, too."

Muhammad Ali--third on the ESPN list, but first on Sports Illustrated's--had the guts to risk it all by taking on the Draft Board and speaking his mind on racial injustice and prison issues.

Babe Didrikson, an outstanding golfer and an Olympic gold medalist in the javelin and hurdles, was tenth on the ESPN list and the highest ranked woman. She paved the way for female athletes by being the antithesis of the male ideal of the proper woman.

Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, number nineteen, battled homophobia when she proudly announced that she was gay.

But when you think of an athlete who has had an impact on who we are and how

we view each other, Jackie Robinson is hard to beat. Even ESPN.com makes that point by quoting Robinson: "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." Yet he ranks fifteenth on the ESPN list, sandwiched between these other great baseball players: Hank Aaron (number fourteen) and Ted Williams (number sixteen).

Robinson was born in rural Georgia in 1919. His mother, Mallie, moved her family to Pasadena, California...