Roger Federer wins his 14th grand slam title, and is all but crowned the greatest tennis player in history. Stephen Strasburg is drafted by the Washington Nationals as the greatest pitching prospect baseball scouts have ever seen. Another title for Phil Jackson of the Los Angeles Lakers could make him greatest basketball coach of all time, and Tiger Woods prepares for this week's U.S. Open hoping to reassert his status as the greatest golfer ever. Along with Michael Phelps' eight gold medals and another Super Bowl ring for the Pittsburgh Steelers, this has been one of sports' greatest stretches for 'greatest' buffs, whose greatest obsession is to argue about who is, you know, really good. All this 'best' business is enough to make one forget how futile the arguing truly is. One of the allures of competitive sport is its conclusiveness: The scoreboard says who won, who lost, go home. It's when each of these daily pixels is considered part of a larger picture that things get far more fuzzy. And loud. In a sports world teeming with numbers, no statistic is sufficient. No argument is irrefutable. Debates over the 'greatest' athletes become Escher staircases of rhetoric. Federer's recent win in the French Open made him the sixth player to win titles in all four major tournaments (the Wimbledon and the French, Australian and U.S. Opens). Then again, his total of 14 majors only ties Pete Sampras; of course, Sampras retired in his early 30s and Federer is still only 27; but wait, Sampras was ranked No. 1 for a record 286 straight weeks; then again, Federer has won majors on hard surfaces, clay and grass. And what about Bjorn Borg, who won 11 majors before retiring at 26, younger than Federer is now? The debate over whether greatness is defined by an excellent shorter period (Sandy Koufax) or a less-excellent longer period (Warren Spahn) is endless. When someone 'proves' each spring that a 1-25 college basketball team is better than the national champion because it beat a team that beat the team that beat some team that beat so-and-so that in December upset the champs, it's funny every year. Instructive, too. Each sport tries to find the right balance between promoting unscriptedness ('on any given Sunday ...') and preserving legitimacy ('may the best team win') in its quest to crown the best. One of the most unpredictable of sports, baseball, plays 162 games in part so that impostors don't make the playoffs; it then plays best-of-5 and best-of-7 series to whittle down to a World Series champion. But even a 60-40 favorite to win in any World Series game will lose the series 31 percent of the time. This is why we watch. Then there's the Dan Marino dilemma: Can an otherwise fantastic quarterback be considered among the greatest when he never led the Miami Dolphins to a Super Bowl title? It's hard to argue that Trent Dilfer's leading the 2000 Baltimore Ravens to a championship punches his ticket into the elite (though somebody surely has done such a thing), but individual greatness typically requires team rings. Alex Rodriguez has far better career statistics than Derek Jeter and would be preferred by almost any talent scout in the game, but Jeter's four World Series titles to A-Rod's none long ago polished Jeter to a sheen of greatness that will sparkle forevermore. We argue about the relative greatness of sports figures because humans are wired to rank things, said Dr. William Pollack, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. 'Caring about who is best comes from a function that originally has to do with survival,' he said. 'You would want the person who represented you in your tribe to be the best at it -- because without them being the best, or winning, you might starve to death or be attacked. That part is neurologically set in. We are ranking and ordered animals.' In sports, as ticket prices rise and beer costs a bundle, arguments over the greatest team or athlete remain free, the fans' province alone. The debates become a form of competition, blurring the line between spectator and player. Terry Francona of the Boston Red Sox once joked, 'Being a baseball manager is the only job where everyone you meet thinks he knows more than you do.' Will a 10th title for Phil Jackson make him a better coach than Red Auerbach, whose nine rings with the Boston Celtics came before free agency and when there were fewer teams in playoff rounds? Can the 1927 Yankees be considered the greatest team of all time when they would have turned away Jeter because his father is black? And now that Federer and Woods are generally considered their sports' best ever, who is greater, Federer or Woods? In the end, Muhammad Ali had the best argument of all. He was the Greatest because he said so -- and beat up all heretics. 