The Don Draper of Professional Sports

If you're not watching Mad Men, shame on you for missing the parade of heavy drinking in awesome suits, and double shame for missing the ultimate alpha male, Don Draper. Draper drinks like a fish, attracts beautiful women like garbage attracts flies and doesn't really work so much as walk around looking good and issuing weird proclamations his underlings struggle to understand--and that's all in between steak dinners, martinis and long nights partying with the boys.

Despite all of this, Draper never really seems to pay for his mistakes, and instead skates along from success to glitter-covered success. Though there is no single leader for the position of the Don Draper of Sports, there certainly are intriguing candidates:

Lance Armstrong. Not using his real name, since no one is actually named "Lance Armstrong," just like Draper's real name is actually "Dick Whitman." Like Draper, attracts beautiful women repeatedly. Un-Draper-like in his denial of using chemicals to improve his performance.

Roger Goodell. Earns the comparison for wielding godlike powers around the office and for perpetually wearing a stylish, well-cut suit at all times (probably, we suspect, even in his sleep). A hard-charging executive like Draper, too, and probably someone who would have been quite comfortable with the office culture of the '50s where you just roamed around telling women in pencil skirts what to do all day. Loses points for lack of hard boozing, privileged upbringing (Goodell is the son of a U.S. senator) and the inability to pomade his hair properly.

John Daly. Okay, so he only used to drink a lot, has never worn a suit well, and is in charge of nothing but his driver and a Twitter account. We only mention him to point out that the only person in contemporary professional sports we can think of who came close to matching the herculean amount of booze consumed was Daly at his peak.

For the winner, though, we have to go back to the actual decade of Mad Men, where our winner thrived under the same bright city lights...

Winner: Mickey Mantle. Like Draper, came from humble, obscure beginnings to find success in the Big Apple. A cocktail warrior like Draper, Mantle commanded a mythic amount of respect from the press and teammates who overlooked his carousing and drinking in favor of highlighting his spectacular talent. Like Draper, worked his way through an impressive array of women, frequented the finest restaurants in Manhattan and probably didn't remember it all very well. The baseball diamond's version of the original Mad Man shows why we hope the series ends before the '70s kicks in: that way we avoid both the sight of our hero in leisure suits and his inevitable decline into the disastrous, unglamorous dark side of alcoholism.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.