Overrated Alexander Graham Bell’s Patent No. 174,465, for his telephone, is commonly thought to have earned more money than any other single patent in history. His invention was certainly notable, but it was an imperfect prototype, and Bell made no significant contribution to the telephone thereafter.
Overrated So many to choose from— The Best Years of Our Lives , The Night of the Hunter , High Noon —so little space in which to vent one’s spleen. But right up against it, I’d have to choose John Ford’s The Searchers .
It was a late starter in the masterpiece sweepstakes; when it appeared in 1956, the critics more or less dismissed it as just another Western, albeit more handsome than many. That it surely was; Ford never worked his little patch of Monument Valley ground, as well as other Western locations, with greater power. And it does contain what may be John Wayne’s most towering and ferocious performance, as lonely, lovelorn Ethan Edwards, returning from the Civil War to his brother’s bleak ranch and his unacknowledged love of the man’s wife.
Overrated A beautiful swing is not enough to earn the excessive praise Tom Weiskopf has received over the years. He didn’t win enough to fulfill the potential his talent seemed to promise because he did not combine obvious physical gifts with the control of the mental side of performance requisite to greatness: a tamed temperament and a consistent will to win.
Overrated Davy Crockett lived a hell of a life, no matter how you look at it. Because the facts don’t live up to the dime novels and Walt Disney and John Wayne doesn’t mean that Crockett was a fraud. In fact it’s amazing how much of the legend has grown from a hard kernel of truth. Crockett was an extraordinary hunter; he did fight in Indian wars; he did end up opposing Andrew Jackson’s more obnoxious policies; he was, for his time, fairly progressive on the issue of Indian rights; and last but certainly not least, he did choose to go to Texas, where he fought for independence and died at the Alamo. If his motives for joining the Texas army were not so idealistic as Fess Parker’s, there can never be any doubt of his commitment to republican government and what he conceived of as freedom. But even if every tall tale were true, neither Crockett nor any other American frontiersman before or after had as much of an impact on American history as Christopher (“Kit”) Carson.
Overrated How can you overrate the Founding Fathers? They had their shortcomings, but when you consider their achievements, the desire to erect marble statues of them and haul busloads of sullen and inattentive schoolchildren to their birthplaces becomes understandable.
Overrated John Gotti. A loudmouth truck hijacker in a thousand-dollar suit. He lacked brains, leadership, imagination, and couth. His blow-dried coif and monogrammed socks never added up to class. The press loved his swagger; the feds loved the hours of incriminating conversations he stupidly provided from his bugged headquarters. He undermined his criminal “family” and dragged his own sons into the rackets. Guys like Gotti give the mob a bad name.
Overrated There are so many overrated comedians that you could throw a custard pie and hit 10 of them, but the all-time honors go to Milton Berle. Berle was one of those comedians that you are supposed to laugh at . He looked funny, he dressed in outrageous getups (often women’s clothes, an instant comic turnoff for me), and he did anything for a laugh. He made a lot of noise, and he had a frenetic, wacky persona. In short, he behaved the way a comedian is supposed to behave. I admired his energy and courage and even his brashness—he bullied laughs out of audiences through the sheer force of his slam-bang style—but I never once cracked a smile. I don’t like clowns, and Berle was essentially a clown.
Overrated Connie Mack (born Cornelius McGillicuddy) is to baseball what George Washington is to American patriotism. But the ascetic string bean of a manager, always in civilian clothes, stiff white collar, and straw hat, was more a loser than a winner in his half-century of managing—and mismanaging—the Philadelphia Athletics. Yes, he had nine pennant winners and won five World Series, mainly while he presided over two Philadelphia dynasties, 1910-14 and 1929-31. But he also amassed more losses—4,025—than any other pilot in the record books, and for the last 17 years of his reign his club finished in the first division only once. His 1914 team, with its $100,000 infield (Mclnnis, Collins, Barry, Baker), suffered one of the most humiliating World Series defeats when it dropped four straight to George Stallings’s “Miracle Braves.”
Overrated For a hundred years the armor-plate scandal of the 1890s has been offered up as a definitive example of corporate greed. In fact it’s a better example of government incompetence.
Battleships were becoming the measure of naval might at the end of the nineteenth century. As the United States began to emerge as a Great Power and started to build a significant navy, it needed a domestic source of armor plate. But the steelmakers, notably Andrew Carnegie, were reluctant to build the necessary mills. Armorplate mills couldn’t be used for other types of steel, and there was only one possible customer: the Navy. Worse, Navy bureaucrats, ignorant of the difficult realities of steel production, established specifications that were impossible to meet.