Who’s The Greatest Athlete Ever From Shreveport-Bossier?

The other day, I ran across a research piece done by beenverified.com that listed the incredible amount of stars that Shreveport and Louisiana have contributed to the NFL.

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In fact, it could be argued that for a town our size, Shreveport could easily be declared the NFL's greatest quarterback factory. Only 7 cities are credited with contributing more quarterbacks to the NFL than Shreveport, and all of those places are huge, metropolitan cities.

The survey showed that eight NFL quarterbacks were all from the Shreveport area, but on further reflection, I'm convinced they forgot one.

Their findings show every quarterback from Terry Bradshaw and Joe Ferguson to John David Booty. But, I think they forgot to include Josh Booty in those numbers, and that would give Shreveport a total of nine.

However, that discussion spawned a pretty intense discussion here and on my Facebook page about the greatest athlete ever from the Shreveport-Bossier area. Of course, we would have to include all sports and some of the cities immediately outside of Shreveport-Bossier like Benton, Blanchard, Keithville, Stonewall, Haughton and a few more.

We've Had Some Really Big Names, But Who's The Biggest Of All?

Who would you say is the greatest athlete ever from our area? Terry Bradshaw, Hal Sutton, or maybe it's Albert Belle or Robert Parish? Or maybe someone we haven't even listed like Stromile Swift, Freddie Spencer or BJ Ryan?

I asked the question on my personal Facebook page and just look at all the suggestions I got.

• Terry Bradshaw - football
• David Toms - golf
• Hal Sutton - golf
• Freddie Spencer - motorcycle racing
• Joe Delaney - football
• Pat Tilley - football
• Robert Parish - basketball
• Joe Ferguson - football
• Todd Walker - baseball
• Dak Prescott - football
• Terrace Marshall - football
• Trent Taylor - football
• Alana Beard - basketball
• Jacob Hester - football
• Stan Humphries - football

A few years ago someone put together their list of the greatest from the area, but it just didn't seem complete. Take a look for yourself.

Oh, and by the way. Though the argument is far from over, the leading vote getter I got in this discussion was Terry Bradshaw, and I'm just fine with that.