guess it depends on the region and part of the world, it's a big world and it's human nature to be ethnocentric but I always ask people from other countries about Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali and they always know of them at least. I never ask about Michael Jordan but maybe they know him too. I don't know, it's s strange thing, you get men like Ali and Bruce and they just hit a chord across the globe and no one is really even sure why but they do.
I agree.
For Basketball, 5+ people of all the top ten stats lists for the german league are americans.
Still the popularity of Basketball is not that bad, its quite high on the top sports list in Germany, but soccer is of course very far away on top. And the biggest rise in popularity did not come with Jordan, but with Schrempf and Nowitzki.
Maybe today Jordan is more known here, in the nineties it felt to me that Ali was on another level still.
Of course, if you ask german basketball fan, they will tell you the opposite
Bruce is also big in Germany.