Nick Wright Mailbag: GOAT of GOATs debate, could LeBron James run for president?

**Nick Wright** (0:02)
Welcome in What's Wright? with Nick Wright episode 483 This episode of What's Wright? with Nick Wright is presented to you by Boost Mobile. This is our mailbag episode, and you can send long, listen, you can put questions in the chat, you can reply to us on Twitter with questions, and if you want to send long questions, you can email us whatswrightmailbagatgmail.com.
Again, a reminder to you guys, we're going to have a couple quick, very quick episodes next week where we try to hit on all 32 NFL teams, just kind of one minute a team, quick stories as next week I'll be on vacation, but that way something actually shows up in your guys' feed. The way you don't miss it is to subscribe to the pod. So we have some very long and thoughtful emails that I've been waiting to get to, and we also have some quick hitter ones, and I'm just going to start with this from Daryl. Daryl writes, these first few are in response to our Goat of Goats segment on TV, where I talked about how if Messi, if Argentina were to win the World Cup again and be the first team to go back to back in more than 60 years, and Messi were to have all of the records and career that he has, that he would have an argument that of all the goats, he is the goatist, the goat of the goats. Darrell writes, Messi cannot be considered the goat of all sports as he plays no defense. Yesterday versus Spain, the dude stood at midfield for over 70% of the match. He's literally the James Harden of soccer. Darrell, I say this with no due respect. It's one of the worst opinions I've ever heard. The comp is not for Messi James Harden and being like, why doesn't he get criticized for not playing defense? The comp would be Randy Moss. How many passes has Randy Moss broken up? It's not his position. I understand that in soccer, everyone's on the field at the same time, but different guys have different roles. It is that is no different than one arguing, how good was Roger in this World Cup? Look at how few goals he scored.
Or maybe a better example would be killing a goalkeeper for not adding more to the offense. Messi's a right-winger. His job is to be the engine of the offense. So unlike, I understand when you say, James Harden's job is to be the engine of the offense. Yes, but in basketball, you have to guard your position. In soccer, you really don't. If you're a striker, if you're the position, Messi plays, you don't have defensive responsibilities. So that's just, I think it's just fundamentally misunderstanding the sport. So more Goat of All Goats conversations. RJ and Tyler mention that I left out Michael Phelps and that if I was going to include Bolt, I was going to include Phelps. I didn't forget Michael Phelps. I intentionally left Michael Phelps out for two reasons. One is my criteria for being in the Goat of All Goats discussion was multifaceted. One of them was you have to be the undisputed Goat of your own sport, which is why, sadly, I couldn't include LeBron in the discussion. He's not the undisputed Goat of professional basketball.
That was just as a for instance. No baseball player made the discussion because I don't think there is an undisputed Goat amongst baseball players. Another qualifier was you got your Goat case was graded on a curve that was directly correlated to how many people worldwide are playing your sport. It really hurt Brady's Goat of all Goat case because American football is really only played here. It really hurt Wayne Gretzky's case because hockey is played by so many fewer people than sports like basketball, soccer, track and field. That, Michael, swimming is obviously done by more people than hockey or American football, but not nearly as many people like, I know this is going to sound basic, but in world history, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people at some point in their life ran.
And, Bolt's the fastest guy to ever live.
The majority of people in world history, not only did the majority of them not swim, or not, not, not, not only did the vast, vast, vast majority of them not swim, the majority of them never swim. And I don't even know what the numbers are right now, like of the 8 billion people, 7.5 billion people we have, how many of them can actually swim. So that hurts Phelps at least a little bit. But the real thing that hurts Phelps, in my opinion, is my own personal crusade that we vastly overrate swimming Olympians because of their ability to stack up medals in the same distance race, just by doing it in so many different disciplines. Like whenever I hear greatest Olympian ever, and it was Spitz and then it was Phelps, or it's Ledeck, it's like, man, do you not think, do you honestly think that if Bolt had five ways to win a gold medal running 100 meters, he wouldn't have won five golds in the 100 meters three Olympics? It's like, all right, this one's a sprint, this one you run backwards, this one's sidesaddle, this one's skipping, he's just faster than everybody. And so I've always felt that swimmers get a little, a little extra oomph that I don't think is fair. Robert on the Goat of All Goats discussion, writes, big fan of yours in First Things First, this week you talked about Goat of All Goats. Unless I missed it, I feel like there was an obvious one in John Jones. He'd be my pick. I feel like it's a perfect fit as MMA's worldwide and it's based off pure talent. So this is where I'm just going to, I guess, admit my own knowledge gaps.