Brennan: Athlete of the year a three-way race to finish

Christine Brennan | USA TODAY Sports

Show Caption Hide Caption Serena Williams' dramatic impact USA TODAY Sports' Christine Brennan on Serena Williams' dramatic impact on women's tennis, and her unprecedented late career success.

The end of August usually is one of those in-between times in sports. College and pro football are almost here, but not quite. Summer sports like tennis and golf are wrapping up. Big things are on the horizon, for sure, but because September is full of kickoffs, August sometimes feels like a set-up month.

Not 2015. This year is different. It has been big from the beginning, and it’s not stopping now.

It had us at American Pharoah.

Or perhaps at Jordan Spieth. Or the U.S. Women’s World Cup victory. Or Serena Williams.

Those have to be the four finalists for athlete/sportsperson/sports people of 2015, and, interestingly, while the U.S. soccer team barnstorms the country in a victory tour of exhibition games, the three individual athletes aren’t yet finished with their work.

In fact, they all are competing again in the next few days: American Pharoah in the Travers Stakes on Saturday, Spieth in the FedExCup Playoffs starting Thursday and Williams in the U.S. Open beginning Monday.

In most other years, each one of them would have sealed the deal by now as the year’s top athlete, such was the prominence of their triumphs even before setting out again over the next few days.

A Triple Crown winner for the first time in 37 years? How does that not immediately qualify the horse as the athlete of the year?

A 21-year-old wins two major men’s golf titles and nearly wins the other two (the last as a 22-year-old)? What beats that?

The nation’s most beloved national sports team wins the World Cup for the first time in 16 years? The last time it happened, in 1999, that team was honored with all kinds of end-of-the-year awards. So why not this time too?

And, of course, there’s Serena, who we’ve known for so long that she feels like a member of the family, or at least our high school graduating class. All she has done is win the last four majors in tennis: from last year’s U.S. Open through this year’s Wimbledon, with the 2015 U.S. Open and the first calendar-year Grand Slam in tennis in 27 years hanging in the balance.

If Serena wins the Open, becoming the first woman or man to win the Grand Slam since Steffi Graf in 1988, she would be my choice as sportsperson of the year. How could she not be? She would not only have won all four majors in the same year, she also would have tied Graf for the most Grand Slam titles won by a tennis player, male or female, in the Open era, with 22.

Consider, also, that if Serena achieves the Grand Slam, she will do it at the age of 33, with her 34th birthday less than a month away. That’s extraordinary longevity in a sport often known for relegating young women to the discard pile while they are still teenagers.

Graf was different. She played forever, it seemed. She was really old when she retired, wasn’t she?

She was 30.

Serena has been so dominant for so long that it’s easy for some to underappreciate her. Funny how fans didn’t seem to feel that way when Tiger Woods was so dominant in golf. It’s well past time for all of us to realize how remarkable her run is, coming at the best, most competitive time in the history of women’s sports, including tennis.

So if Serena wins the Grand Slam on Sept. 12, she’s my athlete of the year. But let’s have some fun. Say Spieth goes on to win the FedExCup on Sept. 27. Say American Pharoah wins the Travers Stakes Saturday, then takes the Breeders’ Cup Classic on Oct. 31. Because the Breeders’ Cup began in 1984, American Pharoah would become the first to win horse racing’s new Grand Slam.

So, in this scenario, we’d have one Grand Slam vs. another, with the top golfer of the year and the best soccer team in the world thrown in for good measure. You could have a nice conversation about all of that. In fact, I think we just did. The dog days of August have never had it so good.