It's only a matter of time.  Any day, Barry Bonds will hit home run number 715 and pass Babe Ruth for second place on the career home run list.  We can debate the means he used to get there, but there's no disputing the truth contained in those numbers.

In a very real sense, though, no one will ever surpass the Babe.  He was the nation's biggest star, playing on the world's grandest stage, at a time when we wanted our heroes larger-than-life and painted without shades of gray.  His accomplishments may fade, but The Myth will never die. 

Just like Marilyn Monroe.

Looking at pictures now, it's a little hard to see what all the fuss was about.  She's clearly an attractive woman, but at least during her "natural" phase, it's more girl-next-door than salacious-sex-siren. 

But the staying power of the 50s blonde bombshell is a perfect counter-point to today's disposable celebrity culture.  Britney Spears / Lindsay Lohan / Paris Hilton / Anna Benson / Jessica Simpson and many interchangeable others all at one time have been this century's the hot girl of the moment.  As a society of Us Weekly readers, we have an unquenchable desire for the next new thing.  Once we find it, we want more, more, more ... right up to the point where we no longer find that thing interesting and we move on to the next girlofthemoment. 

Mrs. AK-47 is a great example.  Before her recent declaration of unselfishness, she was a nobody.  Being one of Russia's top models is a bit like being one of England's best chefs.  There ain't a whole lot of competition.  But then she pulled a reverse Benson and managed to start the clock on her 15 minutes, which should be running out just about ... now.

So yeah, there are a great many super-hot athlete wives running around.  The question is: will we remember any of them in 10 years, let alone 40? 

I don't think so. 

So my nomination for hottest athlete's wife has to be the former Norma Jean. 

There's a difference between "looks good on an airbrushed magazine cover" and "sexy."  And no one embodied the latter more than Marilyn Monroe.

She achieved her cinematic sex-symbol peak in 1959's "Some Like It Hot," the only film made before the 1970s to land on a recent top 20 list of sexiest movies*, despite the obvious handicap of containing no actual nudity.  The high point is a scene Roger Ebert once described as "a striptease in which nudity would have been superfluous," an almost impossible concept for us modern folks to get our heads around.  

Today's insta-porn culture is all stimulus-response - hot chick poses in Maxim, guys go crazy.  No need to engage anything above the medulla oblongata.  On the other hand, Marilyn lived in a time when men (and women) understood that sexual attraction was more than a matter of how little clothing one could wear. 

And just like we can never go back to the era of Babe Ruth (nor, in fact, would we want to), we can also never return to the time of Marilyn.  And that is both a shame (for there will never be another Marilyn Monroe) and a treasure (for there will never be another Marilyn Monroe). 

So you can have your Mmes. Seikaly, Stojakovic and Woods.  I'll stick with a true American original, Mrs. Joe DiMaggio. 

(As for why I should move on to the second round, I shouldn't.  I'm not actually in the contest.  But I thought it was a fun topic and felt like writing something.)

*No link, Google it yourself if you're not one of the many, many underage folks who seem to be running rampant around here.