With most of the greatest athletes in team sports, from Bill Russell to LeBron James, from Johnny Bench to David Ortiz, from Walter Payton to Peyton Manning and from Bobby Orr to Sidney Crosby, we have memories from championship games and series that offer verification of their excellence.

They have rings they can flash when anyone wonders what they accomplished.

Not everyone is so fortunate, even among the blessed.

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Some of the best athletes in the history of American team sports never won it all. Some of them never came all that close. As Clayton Kershaw tries to win his first World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers after mystifying regular-season hitters for more than a decade, as Chris Paul begins another attempt to at least find his way to the NBA Finals, all surely are cognizant that they could wind up as one of those all-time greats whose career is accompanied by an asterisk — never won the big one.

This is Sporting News’ list of the 25 greatest players in those four major leagues who did not manage to achieve a championship. We did not consider those who won national championships in their sports at the college level. You can say Patrick Ewing never won it all, and you may be a Knicks fan who waited years for it to happen, but we all saw him celebrate with the Georgetown Hoyas at the 1984 NCAA Final Four.

These guys never had that chance.