Speaking of fishing, baseball Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams is also a member of the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame. According to Wikipedia:
Not champion, but Jerome Bettis has a 300 game in bowling, and is considered to be one of the top celebrity bowlers in the sport.
Good one. It was said that Ted Williams of the Red Sox was also a world-class fisherman, although I don’t think there is any way to confirm that - there was no pro circuit at the time. He may just have had the means to travel the world and catch all kinds of different fish. Kind of like the “big game hunters” of the past. They were mostly a small group of wealthy white guys who could afford to outfit an expedition to Africa. But the best hunters? I doubt it.
In the context of this thread, I’m unimpressed with Heisman trophies or any other kind of amateur success. I mean, do you really consider Ron Dayne to be one of the best football players?
The OP is talking about being truly great at the professional levels. Look again at the accomplishments of the women in the links. Those women were basically Tiger Woods and Roger Federer rolled into one.
The only ones I would agree with are comparable would be Deon Sanders and Bo Jackson.
Dave DeBusschere - Wikipedia Played pro basketball and pitched for the White Sox. hall of fame for both. Plus youngest coach in NBA history.
He isn’t in Cooperstown. According to this:
Deion Sanders was a “truly great” professional baseball player?
Dick Groat at least meets the Deion Sanders standard.
I thought he was. He wasn’t? I’m not a baseball fan, but I lived in the South while he was on the Braves, and he seemed like a force to be reckoned with when he was in.
I dunno, from his wiki article he sounds pretty damn impressive:
Compare that to Dick Groat’s one season in the pros.
Career average of .263.
'Nuff said.
The women mentioned in the OP were amateurs. Time was that only amateurs could compete in the big events and professionals would barnstorm the world.
Jim Thorpe sprang to mind for me as well, but today, you’re not going to find athletes like this. (Some impressive examples from the recent past have been cited.) They may have the talent to succeed in several sports, but they’re encouraged to pick one and concentrate on it to develop their skills and have a chance to make money as a professional. Amateurs had less reason to specialize. At this point, two-sport athletes are vanishingly rare once you get out of the college level.
Not Michael Jordan
I don’t think we’ll ever see a Thorpe or Dideriksen Zaharias again. They were to the sports world what Dante or Leonardo were to the world of learning and arts: an artifact of the era before super-specialization.
How about Carl Lewis? He was simultaneously the best sprinter and the best long jumper in the world for a time, and while those both fall under the umbrella of Track and Field, they’re widely different skill sets.
Damn. And died hitting a stand-up triple. Dude. The Conacher boys were quite a group…
I’m so glad you quoted that link, which I passed over the first time it was posted. This is one hardcore athlete:
Damn.
Yeah, but it’s not like playing baseball requires endurance. Are players really ever tired after a game?
To comment in my own thread, amateur success on a high level impresses me, far more than middling talent in professional sports.
To comment on some candidates, Fry is on the level of Zaharias and Dod, Conacher is on that level, Herschel Walker (from the Millrose Games footage I’ve seen) is reasonably close to that level, I don’t know enough about lacrosse to comment on Jim Brown, Sanders wasn’t on that level (his baseball OPS+ is 89, below league average), and I’m not sure that Jackson would have been on that level without injury (his on-base percentage tended to be below league-average, he struck out a lot, and he doesn’t appear to have been an impressive fielder).
Understood, but my point is that more often than not that’s exactly what the progression is. I would’ve thought my example of the record-shattering Heisman-winning Ron friggin’ Dayne would have made that point pretty convincingly.
Amateur success on a high level frequently translates into middling talent in professional sports, which is exactly why I’m not impressed by it.
Well, John Brodie was an All-Pro quarterback for the 49ers, and later won a few golf tournaments on the PGA seniors tour. (I suspect he could have been a stellar rpo golfer in his youth, if he’d gone that direction instead of playing football.)
Yep. A well-earned :smack: .
Other than catchers and pitchers, I wouldn’t think so.