What Does It Take to Be the Greatest of All Time?

Alternative title: An NBA player and a surgeon walk into a bar.

The greatest athlete of all time is unquestionably Michael Jordan.

In the 1997-1998 NBA Season, Jordan not only completed the MVP trifecta (All-Star, regular season, Finals), but also led the Bulls to their sixth championship.

That same year, at the age of 35, he played over a hundred games and led the league in scoring. Injuries that benched his talented teammates forced Jordan to carry the scoring burden. At the time, NBA teams routinely played four games in five nights. To this day, no player that age has ever played more minutes.

Jordan of course possessed incredible amounts of natural talent, but his focus and work ethic propelled him to greatness. On game days, for example, Coach Tim Grover would arrive at Jordan’s mansion fifteen minutes before their scheduled morning workout. Jordan would be halfway through the warmup, regardless of the time the team arrived back in Chicago the night before.

Jordan pushed himself and his teammates to the point where many called him a tyrant, a man with an unhealthy obsession. Jordan brushed off those critiques in his documentary The Last Dance:

You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t fucking do. — Michael Jordan

He also made no secret about the sacrifices he made to be the GOAT, Greatest Of All Time:

It’s funny. A lot of people say they’d like to be Michael Jordan for a day or for a week. But let them try to be Michael Jordan for a year. See if they like it… Let them see that it’s no fun. — Michael Jordan

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with one of the GOATs of cancer: Dr. Melvin Silverstein.

In 1979, Dr. Silverstein built the first multi-disciplinary center that focused on breast cancer. He performed some of the first mammograms and, with his pathology colleagues, discovered a new disease: Ductal Carcinoma in Situ or DCIS.

Before mammograms, women presented with palpable lumps, not screen-detected calcifications. In a decade of training and clinical practice as surgeon, Silverstein had never seen DCIS before. Surgeons at the time treated this disease the same as more aggressive invasive disease. Silverstein felt that was wrong. That there was something different about how these cells behaved.

That feeling led to a lifelong quest to define the behavior and treatment of a brand-new disease.

I became wildly passionate about DCIS. I thought about it all the time. I thought about it when I went to sleep. It was kind of more important to me, sadly, than children or soccer games or anything else. — Mel Silverstein

To be the greatest at something requires dedication to the point of obsession, a singular focus that most of us don’t have. I know this is true for the researchers and clinicians who are the most likely to discover groundbreaking treatments. They are often difficult people, odd friends and unreliable partners. But the sacrifice is worth it. Dr. Silverstein thinks so.

If you change any part of your life, you might change where you are now. So, if you like what you have now, you’ve got to accept all the terrible things that went on in the past.

You can listen to our conversation by clicking the YouTube link below, heading over to The Cancer History Project website where there are photos of Dr. Silverstein and his breast center or by searching “Cancer History Project” on any podcast platform. Enjoy!