Full Description
The 100 Greatest Jews in Sports takes the greatest Jewish athletes in all major sports from the past eleven decades and ranks them against each other, using a limited scope and quantitative criteria. Each decade has seen someone new emerge as the greatest Jewish athlete, from boxer Abe Attell to baseballs' Sandy Koufax and Ken Holtzman, to golf's Amy Alcott, to footballs' Harris Barton. Sports profiled include baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, auto racing, boxing, soccer, football, swimming, and many others.
Silverman takes a scholarly approach to ensure reliability and validity of the statistics given. The author identified the most common categories of statistics in which the highest paid athletes in all sports had excelled, and he assigned numeric values to reflect the performance categories. That provided a proportional representation of the most important individual accomplishments in sports. By applying those numbers to the records of selected athletes, each was ranked against the other. Additionally, the author asked selected experts of each sport to perform the same ranking with no specific criteria, and the results were the same.
Filled with historic photographs of the athletes profiled, and interspersed with interesting tidbits of each athlete's personal life and career, this book is certain to be of interest to the casual to serious sports enthusiast alike.
Contents
Chapter 1 Cover Photo Credits and Captions
Chapter 2 Acknowledgments
Chapter 3 Preface
Chapter 4 1. The Scope and Criteria of the Rankings
Chapter 5 2. The Quantitative Rankings Criteria
Chapter 6 3. The All-Time Rankings of Great Jewish Athletes
Chapter 7 4. All-Time Rankings by Era
Chapter 8 5. Unsung Jewish Athletes
Chapter 9 6. Jewish Sports Team Executives
Chapter 10 7. The Jewish Sports Following
Chapter 11 8. Milestones in Jewish Sports History
Chapter 12 9. The Jewish Sports History IQ Test
Chapter 13 Epilogue
Chapter 14 Index
Chapter 15 About the Author
