Borges’s choices: Bobby Orr, Bill Russell, Ted Williams, and Rocky Marciano. Tough to argue with any of these (though he actually seems to have a tough time deciding between Ted Williams and Babe Ruth for the Red Sox representative). Probably the most controversial change is his choice to bump Tom Brady off in favor of Rocky Marciano.

Borges seems to realize that Brady is probably the most universally loved athlete in Boston right now, and pulls out all the stops in building a case for Marciano…

The name that jumps out that was not included is Rocky Marciano, the only heavyweight champion to retire undefeated. Marciano finished his career 49-0 with 43 knockouts, a KO percentage of 87.8 percent. Only one fighter, former champion Ezzard Charles, ever went 15 rounds with him and he was knocked out in a rematch.

Impressive. But in his attempt to overwhelm the reader with the dominance of Marciano, he includes this in his arguement:

Marciano even defeated Muhammad Ali in a computerized fight in 1970.

This computerized fight was simulated on something that looked like this*. And you know what else? According to my XBox simulations (run by the highly advanced MVP 2005 software), the New York Mets actually won the 2005 World Series. It turns out they were the best team in MLB history. They went 162-0 after trading for Ben Sheets and Johan Santana. Carlos Beltran hit 84 home runs, and Pedro Martinez won the Cy Young award with a 0.32 ERA.

*No, really…That’s the first google-image search result for the NCR-315 computer, the computer used to simulate the fight. Also, it turns out they had Ali and Marciano film a ton of different movements that might occur in this fictional fight, and then overlapped the footage to fit the outcome that the supercomputer predicted. The “fight” was then shown in movie theatres. You should really check out the info about the fight…it includes fun facts like “it took 45 minutes to run” the program that simulated the fights, “the ouptut was a formatted report containing a series of codes describing each punch,” and Ali sued the company running the simulations for defamation after he “lost” one of the fake fights.