Eh. Jerry West might have been an amazing self-made guard, an original prototype, and one of the ten best players ever, but he's not the best self-made guard ever.
Your analogy is incomprehensible to me, but I agree that the first isn't necessarily the best. In this case, however, it seems to me that Tolkien set the bar pretty impressively high when it comes to lore creation.
As I've been rereading the three Lord of the Rings novels (up to page 350 something), I'm disappointed with the amount of work that went on creating this world. Not that it isn't impressive and well thought out, but I'm disappointed that it doesn't add much to my experience reading the story being told. In fact, I feel like it hurt the actual story more than it helped.
I remember a scene from Clerks II, when Randall is moaning about how bad the LotR movies were, "Three movies of walking. Three movies about guys walking to a [effing] volcano." And it applies to my reaction to the novels as well.
It seems like more words and paragraphs are devoted to describing every single scenery and landscape, making references to lore that the reader isn't fully privy to (like I'm not part of some inside joke), and it makes me want to skim along until there is some dialogue or actual plot happening.
tl;dr. Too much landscape/scenery description and not enough plot. Well... there is enough plot, but the ratio of plot:scenery is bonkers IMHO.
It's not three novels, it's a single novel published in three volumes. And yes, you're quite right, it's not really a very good novel, at least in some respects. Salman Rushdie made the interesting comment that the Jackson films are better than the book, because Jackson is better at film-making than Tolkien was at novel-writing, and I think it's quite true. But none of this is relevant to the question of Tolkien's skill at lore creation, which was almost entirely concerned with the history of his world rather than its geography. The striking thing about
The Lord of the Rings is that there are frequent references to heroes, places, and other things of the past, and these aren't just names that Tolkien made up to give the impression of antiquity - he'd already worked them all out in detail.
You have to remember that Tolkien wasn't trying to write a hit novel that would top the bestseller lists. He was (re)creating a fictitious mythology using the languages and lore of other cultures. Tolkien was a linguist - a scholar - first and foremost, not a novelist. In all the hype since Peter Jackson's movies, people seem to forget that the actual story in LotR is almost an afterthought, an entry point into Middle-Earth; a way to connect to this vast, epic world that Tolkien created. It's not the equivalent of Twilight or Harry Potter or any other popular fiction that was intended to be popular fiction.
Unfortunately, this misunderstand leads people into the opinions you've expressed, because they come in expecting storytelling on par with current popular fiction (which is, incidentally, aimed at a 5th-grade reading level) and instead they get what feels (to them) like old, musty, boring, archaic history papers about some dumb elves and crap that never even existed.
It depends which book you're talking about though, doesn't it? The
Silmarillion and related works were what Tolkien put together for his own amusement, with the intention of creating a made-up history rather than an entertaining story.
The Hobbit was meant to be an entertaining story for children, but he stuck in a few references to his private mythology along the way. And
The Lord of the Rings was written purely at the behest of his publishers, who found that extracting it from Tolkien made stones seem sanguinous by comparison - they practically had to lock him in a room and force him to write it. And as he wrote it he found himself making it far more deliberately set in the same "world" as his private histories, and more of a sequel to them than to
The Hobbit itself, which is why it starts off all jolly and accessible and by the end everyone's speaking like characters from
Ivanhoe. So it was meant to be a blockbuster popular novel, but somehow turned into something weirder and more scholarly (in a weird way). The fact that despite this it
was a blockbuster popular novel is just one of those things. I suppose people loved the idea of this world with a staggeringly detailed history and lore which was mostly only hinted at.
