Wilt Chamberlain. Joe DiMaggio. Simone Biles. Which of their athletic achievements is most impressive?
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Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak. Simone Biles’s 25 World medals. Which of these athletic achievements is most impressive? And is any of them the most impressive accomplishment in the history of U.S. sports?
That’s the question I asked Twitter a few weeks ago. When I received several thousand (passionate, funny, surprising, and extremely angry) replies, I realized that I’d struck a chord. Everybody has their own subjective definition of amazing. But I wanted something better: an objective definition to easily compare statistics across sports and to separate the merely great from the historic. I settled on the “50 Percent Club.” That is: What American sports records are at least 50 percent greater than the relevant second-place accomplishment?
For example, Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in 1962 is legendary. But Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game in 2006 means that it would take a 121-point game to pass the 50 Percent Test in the category of points scored in a single game. So Chamberlain doesn’t make it into the club on that metric. But his greatest feat isn’t one game; it’s that he scored 60 points on 32 separate occasions. That’s not just 50 percent more than the second-most on that list (also Bryant). It’s almost 500 percent more. In fact, Chamberlain has more 60-point games than every other basketball player in NBA history combined. That makes Chamberlain a card-carrying member of the 50 Percent Club.
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With that benchmark in mind, here are some of the glitziest members of my 50 Percent Club. If you think the list is imperfect or that my metric is arbitrary, you’re right. If you’re offended that I’m considering annual records alongside career marks, you have my permission to be offended. Also, fair warning that you won’t find some all-time greats here. Michael Jordan isn’t on the list, and it’s not because I think he’s a mediocre basketball player. It’s just that his scoring and titles don’t exceed other competitors by my threshold. Some exceptional athletes, like Jordan and Serena Williams, are akin to Mount Everest—the highest peak among many high peaks. What I’m looking for are Mount Kilimanjaros—heights so soaring that they make the competition look like a flat plain below them.
I’ll get to the official 50 Percent Club in a second. But first I’ll check off some famous accomplishments that don’t quite meet the threshold.
The Almost-50-Percent Club
These sports achievements are legendary and maybe impossible to repeat. But they don’t quite beat the competition by 50 percent.
The 50 Percent Club: The Outer Circle
I’m not going to argue that these are the greatest athletic accomplishments in history. But they’re still amazing, and they each pass the 50 percent threshold in some way.
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The 50 Percent Club: The VIP Suite
You could make a case that any of these accomplishments is the most unusual, statistically aberrant, or flat-out ridiculous U.S.-sports accomplishment of all time.
