Twinkle, Twinkle
Why some stars shine brighter than others
One of the funnier aspects of the term “unicorn” — meant to convey something very rare — is how many different contexts and examples in which the word now applies.
You’ve got your startup unicorns, of which there are now well over a thousand, and only that few because people didn’t start properly counting until 2013. Reach a billion-dollar VC valuation and you join the club. Congrats, Typeface.ai!
You’ve got your basketball unicorns, meaning highly skilled big men with a bag more typical of smaller players, delivering us our second consecutive Kevin Garnett shoutout.
Then you’ve got your unicorns in polyamorous relationships, which I just learned about and will probably be stopping there, but hey, they’re out there grindin’ too.
And finally, not to be forgotten, you’ve got your mythical equine OG: by my estimation, the rarest of the bunch (outside the meadows of Caledonia).
Inherent to the term “unicorn” is the basic economic tenet that the more rare a thing is, the more valuable it becomes. Exclusivity is in.
And in basketball, for instance, those proud few unicorns are hot commodities, precisely because they cannot be easily found. They don’t come around all that often, though San Antonio’s newest Frenchman sure seems to fit the bill.
The thing is, the foremost unicorn in sports right now isn’t playing basketball. He’s playing baseball, and his name is Shohei Ohtani.
Have You Heard?
I will spare you the fuller Ohtani hype piece, not because I’m not hyped too, but because they’re all over the place already. Check out Ben Lindbergh’s piece in The Ringer for a particularly good one.
What I’m interested in today is a question that’s tougher to answer. Why is this incomprehensibly talented star not more famous?
For that matter, why isn’t Ronald Acuna, Jr., who’s having a truly historic season all his own? Why not Ohtani’s (depressingly, sidelined) teammate, Mike Trout? How about Mookie Betts? Or a supernova even newer on the scene, Elly De La Cruz, who’s out here crushing dingers and claiming he’s the fastest man alive?
These are only household names if your household cares about baseball, and that level of interest isn’t what it used to be, even if the sport isn’t quite “dying” like you might have heard.
As such, even some of the best baseball players are not star stars, and while it’s admittedly hard to quantify, I’d venture an anecdata-based guess that Kirk Cousins — he of the zero playoff wins — is probably more famous than any of the above. You like that?
And while I wouldn’t call this single list from YouGov the definitive metric, as it does have a few curious entries — think they probably meant the other Carlos Santana — it supports my Cousins theory (weighing in at #66) as well as something else I suspected.
Three star athletes, who are each the best player in their respective sports — Ohtani, Nikola Jokic in the NBA, and Connor McDavid in the NHL — go no higher on this list than #229 (which is Jokic, the guy who just won a title and probably enjoys a resulting bump; the other two are in the 300s).
Less than half of Americans know who any of them are. To be clear, that’s not the percentage who can correctly identify them; that’s the percentage who say they’ve ever heard of them.
Patrick Mahomes is the proud exception here for the NFL, rounding out the top 10 at roughly 75% awareness. My more reliable metric — whether my Mom knows him — checks out too, along with a compliment: “Handsome!” You’re welcome, big guy!
As for the others? Out of respect, I’d rather not say.
The Watchedmen
Again, one YouGov survey is hardly the final word, but I’m setting my confirmation bias aside to get to The Why.
Why is Patrick Mahomes famous in ways than Ohtani, Jokic, and McDavid aren’t?
The most obvious explanation is that Mahomes plays football. On average, his Kansas City Chiefs drew 15.32 million viewers every time they took the field last season, including the regular season.
Viewership for the NBA Finals that Jokic just won — the biggest event in the sport — averaged 11.64 million.
That’s a serious gap, and only adds to the body of evidence proving what everyone already knew: football is the biggest sport in America, and it ain’t close.
What about market size? None of Anaheim, Denver, or Edmonton are exactly hot spots, though it’s not as if Kansas City is a major metro either, so that’s probably a smaller factor in light of modern technology.
Zooming further out, it probably doesn’t hurt that Mahomes is also the only American of the four. Jokic is Serbian, McDavid is Canadian, and Ohtani is Japanese, speaking to fans through a translator.
I’m not a huge believer in the nationalism aspect of this, but there’s a hint of truth there in terms of who resonates. Every member of the top 10 is a U.S. national, and I imagine you’d see a similar phenomenon around the world.
Is success a factor? Probably. Mahomes has made three of the last four Super Bowls, and won two of them. Jokic just got his first ring, and while McDavid’s at least making playoff runs, Ohtani’s yet to make the postseason, and the Trout injury all but guarantees this won’t be the year that changes.
That moment in the World Baseball Classic gave us a glimpse of what it could be if he ever does, but that was the World Baseball Classic, so.
Winning on your sport’s biggest stage definitely helps. That tracks.
Maybe playing style factors in too? It must, and Mahomes is flashy, that’s for damn sure.
I’d buy that Jokic’s confusingly grounded game (talk about unicorns) doesn’t exactly light the AAU circuit on fire, but you can’t say that about McDavid or Ohtani, both of whom have the same “How did he do that?” dynamism that we admire in so many of the athletes we love.
Finding the Constant
How about… what’s the word… ever-presence? Like a good neighbor, Mahomes stays there. He does a lot of ads, pulling down $20 million a year on endorsements alone and remaining a part of Americans’ daily existence even while the NFL’s out of season.
Part of that is marketable charisma, but my larger guess is: building a brand may be more about wanting to build a brand than any other factor. It takes work, it takes time, and it takes a particular personality to devote enough of both.
And it’s not just the sport they play. America doesn’t widely watch gymnastics outside of the Olympics every four years, and yet, there’s Simone Biles at #7.
Serena Williams is #1, followed by Tiger Woods at #2.
Yes, playing an individual sport helps, which might skew those examples a tad, but I still have to think that the sheer desire and savvy to be professionally famous goes the longest way.
It doesn’t matter that Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world right now; he’s not flashy enough to become its biggest star, and he doesn’t want to be, so he won’t. Imagine that. Others are more than happy to take up the mantle.
Basketball is a sport that’s gotten good at this. Star wattage may be the NBA’s biggest advantage over the NFL, though they might trade a big name or two if it meant closing the ratings gap.
Stars in the other two leagues will have a harder time matching that energy.
You’ll have to excuse the disrespect, McDavid and countrymen, but the NHL lags so far behind in viewership that he’ll have farther to climb to get in the conversation.
As for baseball, they’ve had a star problem since the good ol’ PEDivas days came to their unceremonious end, and it’s hard to tell the chicken from the egg there.
Is the sport’s overall declining popularity lowering the ceiling for its stars? Or has a dearth of stars hurt the sport’s popularity? I’m not sure how to precisely unravel the two, though I’d put more of my chips on the former.
Baseball by its very nature just doesn’t grab fans — especially young fans, the ones with the ever-dwindling attention spans — the way that sports like football and basketball can, and that does make it harder for those same players to achieve visibility on par with the stars of the gridiron and hardwood.
Maybe it can still be done, and I hope to see a new name up in lights one of these days, whether it’s one of the players we’ve named or someone who hasn’t arrived yet.
In the meantime, I’ll issue a prediction on what that person might be like.
I bet they’ll want it. They gotta want it.