There are some sports legends who were so great that when you put their achievements into perspective, they don't even sound real.
Michael Phelps won more Olympic gold medals than anyone else has ever won total medals. Wayne Gretzky had more career assists than any other NHL player has goals and assists combined. The all-time leader in Super Bowl wins by an NFL franchise is "Tom Brady's team".
Meanwhile, if you add the career win totals of the NASCAR Cup Series' second and third drivers on the all-time wins list, David Pearson and Jeff Gordon, you'd have 198 career wins. Richard Petty had 200.
Richard Petty was "The King" for a reason, and his records will never be broken
Petty leads the Cup Series' all-time rankings in a lot of statistical categories, and one of those has to be the amount of absurdly unbreakable records he possesses. The 200 total wins is one of them. Then, there's the 27 wins in a season in 1967. Then, there's the 10 consecutive wins that were part of that 27-win season.
He reached 5,000 laps led in a single season not once, but twice, and came within 100 of doing it a third time. He won seven Daytona 500s, back when the Daytona 500 was actually one of the toughest races to win as opposed to a glorified demolition derby with random number-generated finishing orders. His first and final victories were separated by a whopping 24 years.
Petty was stock car racing royalty. He was The King. He was NASCAR's answer to Mario Andretti, a larger-than-life legend who could be easily identified and associated as the face of the sport while it grew from its infancy stage. He was one of the first drivers to ever have a full-time sponsor and an iconic paint scheme, and he carried a trademark appearance with his massive cowboy hat and dark sunglasses. Really, he was the Cup Series' first true superstar.
Now, there are a few marks against Petty that prevent him from being the runaway No. 1 on this list. His family's organization was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the field. He was one of the only full-time drivers in an era when other stars such as Pearson didn't run all the races. His level of competition paled in comparison to what any driver who has competed in the 21st century, or even during the 1980s and 1990s, has had to face.
Still, 200 wins are 200 wins. Seven championships are seven championships. And to this day, there's arguably no one in the Cup Series garage whose presence carries a greater magnitude when he shows up than Petty, hat and sunglasses and all.
Long live The King.