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Which Athlete Could You Watch an Eight-Hour Highlight Reel Of?

By Ringer Staff

Watching highlights has always been part of the joy of sports, and it’s never been easier than it is right now to find hundreds of clips of just about any famous athlete. But who would you want to watch on tape for a full eight hours? As inspired by Reddit, our staff has some thoughts:

Allen Iverson

Michael Baumann: First of all, it's tough to find any athlete with eight hours' worth of true highlights, but you could probably manage it with AI, who was the perfect storm of attributes for a highlight reel: quickness, handle, creativity, and the willingness to go after any opponent—from Tyronn Lue to Michael Jordan. But it's not just about his crossover—a surprising number of his highlights came on the offensive glass, of all places, emphasizing that, even as the smallest guy on the court, his go-to move was "whatever the hell I feel like.” The turn-of-the-century Sixers were built to make Iverson the first, second, and third offensive option—he pretty much had to score 40 1-on-3 hero ball points for the Sixers to stay in games, and he did. If Steph Curry is the mind-expanding avatar of the modern pace-and-space game, Iverson was the Steph Curry of the physical, ugly, Jordan-obsessed late 1990s.

Maya Moore

Sam Donsky: I’d never watched a WNBA All-Star Game before. I watch a decent amount of WNBA in the regular season, and usually become pretty devoted once the playoffs roll around—but for whatever reason I’d never caught the All-Star Game. Until last year, that is—when I went and saw it live. And here is my experience at the 2015 game summed up in two words: Maya Moore. You know how some players just sort of seem meant to play with other great players? Like, how there’s Knicks Melo … and then there’s Olympics Melo? That’s Maya Moore. A first-team all-league player, on her own, on any day … but put her on the court with four other all-stars? And suddenly she’s transformed—into the all-star. Moore went off for 30, 6 and 5 (in 20 minutes) that day, on 10-16 shooting—including 6-10 from 3. She took over. And it wasn’t just that. There was something about the way she took over: a smoothness, a magnetism, a “this person was born to get buckets” swag.

Her performance hit all of my basketball fan tastebuds: a little prime Paul Pierce, a little “James Harden can win an MVP someday, I swear”–level James Harden, and yeah—a little Olympics Melo. Actually, here’s my best comp: Maya Moore is like if Peak-Peak Tracy McGrady was WINNING CHAMPIONSHIPS. Anyway, after the All-Star Game I was hooked. It was like hearing a great song, out of nowhere, and then having to rush home to listen to all of that artist’s other hits on YouTube. And that’s exactly what I did. So if I had to pick an athlete to watch for eight whole hours? I’d probably want to watch someone do what Maya Moore does better than anyone else on the planet right now: get buckets.

Johnny Manziel

Ben Glicksman: This is weird and sad and maddening to think about, because of what Manziel has already become: In 2016, at 23 years old, the QB is a cautionary tale. He’s an alleged domestic abuser whose own father labeled him as a “druggie,” a guy who NFL teams feared might go astray in the months leading up to the 2014 draft, and then did—only more quickly and recklessly than anyone dared to imagine.

Still, if I had to watch eight straight hours of one athlete’s footage, it’d be of Johnny Football from his time in College Station. Watching him play for the Aggies wasn’t all that different from staring into the sun. It was terrifying, thrilling, and occasionally blinding—a rare instance in which seeing didn’t so much produce belief as it did questions about how it was even possible: his unlikely touchdown scampers; his ability to run in circles and somehow heave the ball to exactly the right spot; his knack for bouncing off defenders before miraculously locating his receiver in the end zone.

Then there was his iconic moment, in A&M’s upset of Alabama from 2012. Manziel cut to his right, lost control of the ball, and corralled it in midair before firing a dart to Ryan Swope.

We’ll probably never see that type of thing from Johnny again. His meteoric rise is now colored by his dizzying descent, and understandably so. But his college tape remains a relic of simpler times: In two years on the college gridiron, Manziel turned in one of the most transfixing highlight reels we’re ever likely to see.

Jaromir Jagr

Katie Baker: I’d happily view the 2008 men’s 4x100 freestyle relay in Beijing on a loop for eight hours, but I’m assuming that’s probably against the spirit of this exercise. So I’ll opt for the opposite instead: rather than a single event involving a group of billiard-bald men, how about a sprawling epoch-length career represented by one majestic mullet? The beauty of a Jaromir Jagr screening is that it’s also a romp through hockey history.

There he is, hair flowing, in the 1992 Stanley Cup Final, tying things up in the third with a goal that CBC’s Harry Neale described like so: “There’s only four people in the whole rink he didn’t deke, and three of them are ushers.” (At the 11-minute mark of this video, Jagr bewilders a dog while reenacting the play.) There he is, playing alongside Mario Lemieux in Pittsburgh gold and making Wayne Gretzky sad over Olympic gold. There he is, lighting the lamp for eight different NHL teams. He scores shorthanded for the Capitals; goes end-to-end in overtime during his stint playing in Russia; and, as a 42-year-old Devil, records a hat trick against the Flyers. And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of his whimsical off-ice antics. Given the source material, you’d likely need a whole ‘nother eight hours for that.

Continue reading "Eight-Hour Highlight Reel" on The Ringer.