ESPN's Faulty List.

I decided to wait until after the New Year's celebrations before commenting on the worst of the "Best of" lists: ESPN's top 100 athletes.

I like ESPN, and my life has been greatly enhanced by twenty-four-hour-a-day sports coverage. But how could they, along with a batch of experts, name Michael Jordan the Athlete of the Century when Jackie Robinson has done more for the country as a whole than any athlete on the list?

I am not here to dis Jordan's skill. He made many of us rethink the idea of unassisted human flight. Other than Julius "Dr. J" Erving, there is no other player I know of who could turn a slam dunk into an event. And if you have any doubt as to who kept the NBA alive after Magic Johnson and Larry Bird left the scene, check out the ho-hum feel of the league after His Airness retired to the golf course.

But--and I guess this is a dis--what did Jordan do off the court to really further humanity? All those Nike commercials didn't advance a single social cause. And given Nike's record of exploiting workers in Asian sweatshops, Jordan's role as a pitchman began to reek. He appeared to be a man without a conscience. His most memorable comment on political matters came when he was asked why he didn't endorse Harvey Gantt, the African American Democrat who ran against racist Republican Senator Jesse Helms in Jordan's home state of North Carolina: "Republicans buy shoes, too."

Muhammad Ali--third on the ESPN list, but first on Sports Illustrated's--had the guts to risk it all by taking on the Draft Board and speaking his mind on racial injustice and prison issues.

Babe Didrikson, an outstanding golfer and an Olympic gold medalist in the javelin and hurdles, was tenth on the ESPN list and the highest ranked woman. She paved the way for female athletes by being the antithesis of the male ideal of the proper woman.

Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, number nineteen, battled homophobia when she proudly announced that she was gay.

But when you think of an athlete who has had an impact on who we are and how

we view each other, Jackie Robinson is hard to beat. Even ESPN.com makes that point by quoting Robinson: "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." Yet he ranks fifteenth on the ESPN list, sandwiched between these other great baseball players: Hank Aaron (number fourteen) and Ted Williams (number sixteen).

Robinson was born in rural Georgia in 1919. His mother, Mallie, moved her family to Pasadena, California, in 1920. Robinson excelled at sports, becoming the first four-sport (baseball, football, basketball, and track and field) athlete in UCLA's history. He was drafted into the Army during World War II, making his way to lieutenant. However, he was nearly court-martialed for refusing to ride at the back of a bus. He was exonerated, then honorably discharged from the Army.

Normally, the word "brave" doesn't enter my discussion of athletics. Running up the middle against a linebacker like former New York Giant Lawrence Taylor, or driving the lane against former Detroit forward Bill Laimbeer isn't as much an act of bravery as it is bad craziness. But for Robinson, playing in the majors when people in the stands are threatening to kill you, pitchers are throwing at your head, and opposing players are sliding into second while aiming their spikes at your shins can only be described as brave.

Robinson, then a not-so-young rookie at twenty-eight, takes the field for the Dodgers on April 15, 1947, which is a year before Truman integrates the military, seven years before the court rules in favor of Brown and against the Topeka Board of Education, and eight years before Rosa Parks decides she doesn't want to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. A country turns its weary eyes to Mr. Robinson, confronts its past, and sees its future.

For kids like my dad, a young black child in the 1940s, Robinson's competitive spirit on the field and elegance off the field were tremendously uplifting.

He embodied the black American experience: a poor son of a sharecropper, the grandson of a slave. When he broke the color barrier that surrounded the national pastime, he became a beloved figure to a generation of both black and white children. He not only changed baseball, which was significant enough, but he helped reshape a society.

And how could ESPN leave Pele off the list? But I'll save that for a beer, a pub, and anyone who cares to listen.

Note: Facing a $3 million estate tax bill, the board of directors for Sengstacke Enterprises has decided to sell off several black newspapers, including the Chicago Defender. That ninety-five-year-old paper is one of two daily black newspapers in the country, the other being the Brooklyn-based New York Daily Challenge.

According to Adweek.com, Myiti Sengstacke said the auction, which was scheduled for the end of January, is necessitated by the breakdown of a recapitalization plan that would have kept the papers in the family's hands.

Robert Sengstacke Abbott started the paper at his kitchen table in 1905. His editorializing and reporting on the oppression in the South and the opportunities in the North helped stimulate the migration of blacks to places like Chicago and Detroit.

It also provided a home for black writers who were ignored by the white press, including W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes.

At its height in the 1930s, the Defender had a circulation of nearly 300,000. In 1956, the paper went from a weekly to a daily. The current weekday circulation is just under 14,000.

There is talk that the Defender may go back to being a weekly, which I hope is not the case.

I lived on the North Side of Chicago, but you could buy the paper at a number of places along the Red Line. Despite being outnumbered and out-advertised by the Tribune and Sun-Times and even the suburban Daily Herald, the Defender offered another voice, another view of the city.

I hope it will continue to fight on into the twenty-first century.

Fred McKissack is a writer based in Milwaukee.