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Larry Felser is one of 13 HOFMAG.com Senior Staff to contribute a list of the Top Ten Most Influential People in Sports History. How does it compare with your own choices or the lists of the other HOFMAG.com writers in the box to the right? Find out all the results, from Who's #1 to "also ran" in HOFMAG.com's Top 10 Most Influential People in Sports History. 10. Henry Luce of Time Inc. – When he founded Sports Illustrated he made all of sports literate each week with great writing and magnificent photography. 9. John Wooden – He took basketball from its YMCA-peach basket ways into a scientific, disciplined sport which honed in on the anonymous open man. 8. Arnold Palmer – He made the World at leisure want to throw its bags in the trunk of the car and then hitch up its trousers on the fairways. 7. Knute Rockne – His decision to take his Notre Dame team to play at USC not only converted college football from a regional to intersectional sport but acknowledged the West Coast as a collasus in the making. 6. Avery Brundage – Even more than the Marquis this autocrat made the modern Olympics what it is. 5. Pete Rozelle – Once he embraced a merger he fought fiercely, he made a brother-in-law sport into a national obsession and enriched every connected with the NFL in the bargain. 4. Babe Ruth – This one belongs to Mr. Creamer alone, otherwise he might have made my top three for satisfying America's thirst for instant gratification with those mighty swings. 3. Jackie Robinson – Better players were in the Negro Baseball League but none with the discipline to bank his inner fires in order to serve as a labratory experiment which became the Great National Sociological breakthrough. Only later, when his bottle was uncorked, did we get to know what a painful trqnsition he made. 2. Muhammad Ali – He brought genuine athleticism to prize fighting and then showed us how to celebrate individualism -- the critics be damned. 1. Roone Arledge – He presided at the perfect marriage of sports and television; internationalized sports interest in the US through Wide World of sports and demonstrated with MNF that a football game really isn't just a football game. Near miss: Roger Bannister...on a near-empty track in England, he converted the unachievable into near commonplace. Larry Felser entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983 as the youngest writer ever to receive the Dick McCann Memorial Award for long and distinguished reporting of pro football. He continues to live and write in Buffalo, New York, where he is at work on "Mayhem and Mergers," a book that chronicles the contentious marriage of the AFL and NFL. He can be reached at
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