re: Baddest Badass on the planet?

Biggest, baddest badass on the planet?

Mankind. Bar none. Not even close.

We breathe the gas responsible for the greatest extinction event in planetary history like it's no big deal.

We consume liquids that we know are poisonous just for fun, often challenging ourselves and each other to drink as much of the poison as we can.

We regularly use, as food, certain plants which evolved to acquire a toxin called capsaicin as a defense mechanism... and we use it specifically because we crave that toxin as a spice.

We think nothing of piloting multi-ton masses of steel and plastic at lethal collision speeds every day, with nothing but fragile glass, a leather belt, and our instincts to preserve us from a sudden, violent death.

We hunted some of the largest animals ever to exist to extinction with sharpened stones, literally pursuing them for days until their bodies gave out and their will to flee was broken.

We looked at the wolf, that vicious, fanged, feared hunter, and saw not an enemy to be conquered but a loyal friend to be tamed -- and tamed it we did.

We have sent some of our own beyond the security of our atmosphere into the vacuum of space in little more than a glorified metal tube, with computers less powerful than our contemporary calculators as their only assistance in returning -- and by this, I mean plummeting back to the planet's surface at speeds capable of incinerating aforesaid tube and its inhabitants -- back to our planet's beautiful shores. Never mind computers themselves, and the unmatched logical and creative skills necessary to put them together.

We have made a battlefield tactic out of dropping some of our own hundreds of feet out of flying vehicles with so little as a giant cloth to steady their descent.

We are the embodiment of the kind of reckless, fearless tenacity that defines badassery. It is not merely destined but instinctual for us.

I can't choose between those two men in the OP. They're exemplars among the exemplary. Kings of kings. Badasses to badasses. You can say this for the overwhelming majority of the men who will be playing on November 9th in Death Valley.

Titans among titans -- it'll be a fantastic game. Badass, even.