Note: This list continues from our top five male athletes which can be found here.
A Note on Criteria
For this list, I’m not trying to identify the “best athletes” in a purely technical or statistical sense. I’m interested in athletes whose excellence escaped the boundaries of their sport—who reshaped society, culture, commerce, and the collective imagination. Sustained professional dominance matters more to me than amateur achievement, and peak matters insofar as it translated into lasting impact. Versatility is a bonus, not a requirement.
6. Wayne Gretzky
Wayne Gretzky didn’t just redefine hockey; he popularized it in places where it barely registered before. There have been other great players—Bobby Orr, Eric Lindros, Pavel Bure—but there has never been anyone like Gretzky. He combined statistical dominance with a kind of spatial intelligence that made the game newly legible, even to people who didn’t grow up with it.
With the Edmonton Oilers, Gretzky won four Stanley Cups (1984, 1985, 1987, 1988), anchoring one of the most dominant dynasties in modern professional sports. When he was traded to the Los Angeles Kings, he didn’t win a championship there—but that almost misses the point. In L.A., Gretzky proved his greatness wasn’t system-dependent. He led the Kings to the 1993 Stanley Cup Final and, more importantly, made hockey matter in a non-traditional market. Youth participation surged, media coverage followed, and the NHL’s westward expansion suddenly made sense.
After his playing career, Gretzky has remained an ambassador for the sport—visible, articulate, and largely free of scandal. He may hold some right-of-center views and he has a famously public daughter; neither of these rise to the level of controversy. His global impact doesn’t quite match the saturation of the top five, but in terms of transforming a sport’s reach, style, and imagination, Gretzky stands alone. A worthy number six.
7. Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods is second only to Mike Tyson when it comes to complicated athletic legacy. Jack Nicklaus has more major championships (18 to Tiger’s 15), but Woods is almost inarguably the most dominant golfer ever.
From his appearances on television as a very young child, to his years at Stanford, to his immediate impact after turning professional, Tiger redefined what greatness on the links looked like. His early wins on tour were not incremental; they were seismic. Courses changed. Training changed. Television audiences changed. Golf suddenly had an axis.
Tiger’s career has been defined as much by comebacks as by dominance. His victory at the 2019 Masters, after years of injury and personal collapse, secured his place in history all by itself. Off the course, his massive commercial success was temporarily undone by scandal: affairs, car crashes, substance abuse, and public reckoning. For a time, it looked like the collapse might eclipse the achievement.
It didn’t. Today, Tiger stands as an elder statesman of the game, invested in its future—including an unusually gifted son now competing at a high level. Even if he never wins again, his legacy is complete. Golf before Tiger and golf after Tiger are different sports. The number seven spot is not a compromise; it’s recognition of how fully he reshaped his world.
8. Tom Brady
Over time, Tom Brady has cemented his place as the greatest player at the most important position in America’s most popular sport. There have been other transcendent figures—Jerry Rice, Lawrence Taylor, Anthony Muñoz, Ray Lewis—but everyone understands that the value of a quarterback, in terms of win shares and institutional gravity, dwarfs every other position.
The Brady-versus-Belichick debate will rage on, but Brady settled it decisively by winning a Super Bowl in his forties with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, outside the system that first made him famous. That championship reframed his career from sustained excellence to unmistakable authorship. He wasn’t merely the beneficiary of structure; he was the structure.
Brady’s greatness was never about spectacle. It was about discipline, preparation, and a refusal to decline. His longevity recalibrated expectations for elite athletes. Off the field, his controversies have always felt almost quaint: a close relationship with his trainer, persistent rumors of personality-free excellence, a public divorce, and a criticized broadcasting stint. None of it ever threatened the core of his achievement.
Seven Super Bowl championships, unmatched longevity, and relevance across eras make it hard to imagine anyone eclipsing his résumé. Number eight is a natural fit.
9. Mike Tyson
Mike Tyson emerged from juvenile delinquency to become the brightest star in one of America’s most enduring sports in just a few short years. Still in his teens, he captured the public imagination like very few athletes before or since. His dominance was immediate and terrifying: the speed, the menace, the ninety-second knockouts. It felt less like competition than inevitability.
Although Tyson did not have the longest career and was not undefeated, he remains an icon of boxing greatness, mentioned in the same breath as Ali and Mayweather. At his peak, no fighter has ever been more frightening. Fear itself was part of his cultural impact.
Outside the ring, Tyson lived what Bill Simmons famously called “the Tyson Zone”—the idea that you could hear anything about Mike Tyson and believe it. A sexual assault conviction and prison time. Biting an opponent’s ear off. Face tattoos. Tigers. Pigeons. Weed. Cocaine. Toad venom. It has been a wildly strange life.
And yet, today Tyson is broadly beloved in the way only someone who has lived nearly forty years in public can be. He has been on top of the world, he has been a total mess, and he has inhabited every state in between. Like Sinatra, he’s done it his way. Number nine is exactly where he belongs.
10. Roger Bannister
Roger Bannister rounds out the list. In 1954, he became the first person to break the four-minute mile, running 3:59.4, a feat long considered impossible and one of the purest accomplishments in sport. Anyone who has run the mile competitively understands the pain and resolve required to take down that mark.
The achievement was later immortalized in the cultural imagination through works like Chariots of Fire, which captured the ethos of the era even if Bannister himself remained understated about the feat. After retiring from competitive running later in 1954, Bannister became a distinguished neurologist and academic, eventually serving as Master of Pembroke College, Oxford.
Bannister’s place here rests on a single act—but a singular one. He didn’t just win a race; he redefined what humans believed was possible. For that reason alone, number ten is a fitting landing place.