Late Bloomers: Jake Daubert

From time to time you’ll see some article or video where someone is labeled “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” or “The Sexiest Man Alive,” or something similar. In sports, that’s usually something along the lines of “Bo Jackson is the Greatest Athlete Ever.”

Maybe I’m odd, or just contrarian, but when I see those sorts of things my first snap thought is always, “No, they aren’t.”

Most of the time when I think that, I don’t have anyone else in mind. I don’t even disagree with the point that Bo Jackson, for instance, is a great athlete, maybe the greatest we’ve ever seen. No, what I’m thinking is, “Do you folks have any idea how many people there are on this planet who you’ve never heard of?”

What are the odds that the one person in history who had the most athletic ability ever just happened to be an American from Alabama who played football and baseball on TV a lot in the 1980s? What are the odds that the most beautiful woman on Earth just happens to be a famous actress from, say, Spain? Or that no man currently exists who possesses more sheer sex appeal than the guy who routinely broke the fourth wall on “The Office?”

Somewhere, in a rice paddy in Thailand, or a shoe store in Montréal, or driving a bus in Nairobi, is a sexier man, or more beautiful woman, or a better athlete. We just don’t know it because they don’t happen to be famous, but if the powers that be at People magazine happened to walk into a Montréal shoe store one day and ran across handsome Jacques the terribly sexy shoe clerk, they might have to change their cover and send John Krasinski packing.