Who else? Red Sox are our Sportsmen of the Year

SI.com - Monday November 29, 2004 1:31AM: "Hard to believe, but a few weeks ago, our Sportsman of the Year selection hung in the balance. Oh, there were deserving candidates. A wealth of them. And that was the problem.

Would you bestow the honor on the human parable that is Lance Armstrong, winner of a sixth consecutive Tour de France? Or Roger Federer, who played peerless, lights-out tennis, all the while comporting himself like the consummate gentleman? What about Ichiro Suzuki, who used his bat with surgical precision as he set the all-time record for hits in a season? But was he really more deserving than Diana Taurasi, who became the standard bearer for basketball excellence (gender be damned)? Then there were Olympians such as Michael Phelps and Carly Patterson who prospected so much gold in Athens."