It seems to me that if you’re a champion golfer, those musicians, other athletes, and various VIPs (and all of their groupies) will be lining up to play with you, so you won’t have to spend your days on the course with boring, fat, and old golfers anyway.
Golf does seem like a good choice for a talented goof off. Wish I was better at it!
Well, I think it’s a stretch to call bowling a sport, but there it is. Let’s not argue about it. Enough people think of poker as a sport that having one post about it in a thread of this sort is probably not going to hurt anything.
NFL kicker.
No grueling practices. 16 games. Just come out and do your thing a few times each game. The moneys good if your good.
Injuries are rare. You have the opportunity to be the hero in certain games.
That’s a good one. But they still need to be in shape. And professional poker is a lot of hard work.
In favor of baseball, I have just two words:
Case closed.
This comes down to 2 sports. Golf and Baseball, all other considerations fall way short when you compare the money and longevity.
Golf pays really well if you are one of the top 5 golfers out there. Tiger Woods is a unique situation that far surpasses any golf talent. Mickelson, Palmer, Norman and Els have all managed to creep up the salary rankings, but much of that money is a direct result of Tiger’s popularity. When he’s gone, Golf will slide back in the overall earnings potential. Those golfers that fall outside the top 5 fall way off, it’s a top loaded sport.
Baseball pays much better than golf regardless of endorsements. Most of the top athletes are all baseball players and the salary curve is a fairly flat one. A-Rod made $26+ million, but there were probably another 50 guys earning $10+ million. All that money comes regardless of your Q-rating.
So, if you are really going to be a goof-off, you want to be a baseball player. Baseball “preparation” is often discussed, but it’s almost inconsequential. It offers only a very small increase in a players performance over natural talent. Extensive effort in the weight room is helpful, but not required for a long productive career. Look at Tony Gwynn, CC Sabathia, Livan Hernandez, Ichiro and so on.
Golf, in contrast relies very heavily on preparation. Golfers spend hours and hours playing the courses they will be competing on to learn the angles and obstacles. They have to work constantly on the practice green and driving range to keep their swing consistent. Plus, and this is a deal breaker, they have to wake up at like 4AM in order to make early tee times!
Baseball players drink and womanize, roll out of bed around noon and maybe cruise over to the ballpark at about 5PM for night games. Manny Ramirez is the quintessential “talent”, he’s never read a pitchers scouting report and is typically unaware of who he’s playing against on a given day. He probably works out some, but he’s a long ways from a finely tuned physical specimen. His most rigorous off-field preparation is for his 12-step handshakes with teammates following homeruns.
A-Rod will earn over $600 million dollars before he retires, and he could become the biggest scumbag on earth and not lose a penny of that. If Tiger wakes up in the middle of a drug and whore scandal that $80 million he earns could become $5 million overnight when the sponsors back out. Seem like keeping you public image squeaky clean is as big a hassle as anything.
Baseball, at sunny Wrigley, for me please.
The benefit to golf over baseball is that as a baseball player you are part of the team with that greuling schedule. Easier if you are a pitcher and you can sit out three out of four games, but still the travel schedule alone is going to cut into party time.
Golf’s season is longer - and I think probably every bit as grueling as a baseball season, but if you manage to pull a Daly and win a major off raw talent (and alcohol), you can do fine playing in a few tournaments a year for appearence fees. So you get to control the amount of goof off you do (and the associated reward).
I’d still give the edge to baseball - if you are a pitcher or some other sort of fairly highly paid but not every day player.
The groupies in golf are pretty good looking, actually - and brighter from what I hear. But in both sports you have to put up with a lot of evangelical peers.
Little Nemo:
Currently, that may be true, there’s no overwhelming personality in men’s tennis right now. But generally, male tennis stars have been well known. Do any of these names sound familiar to you: Arthur Ashe, Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Ilie Nataste, Boris Becker, Andre Agassi?
I’m not a fan of pro tennis either, but these names have certainly been known to me. (Then again, I had heard of Federer as well.)
Well, [url=]this list says that in 2006, 31 players made more than $2M, 93 made more than $1M, and 148 made more than $500k. And that’s just prize money - it doesn’t include endorsements, appearance fees, sponsorship money, etc.
I’m not sure I see the Baseball season as particularly grueling.
You play 162 games a year, plus say 40 more in Pre and Post-season play. That’s all of 200 days a year. Not exactly year round. NASCAR, Golf, Tennis and most other individual sports have events happening closer to 10 or 11 months a year. Most of those sports have events that last 4+ days, half of which are barely watched by fans. So while it may appear that golfers only play 20 weekends a year, they are actually playing practice rounds and pro-ams on Tuesday and Wednesday and then fighting to make the cut Thursday and Friday.
In baseball you show up an hour or two before game time and then head home 30 minutes after. You maybe are working 5 hours a day, 2.5 of which is showering and talking to media or teammates in the locker room. Golfers show up at 5AM and hit balls for a couple hours before their round, then proceed to play a 5+ hour rounds. From Thursday to Sunday they are swinging a club for probably 10 hours a day.
In Tennis you bust your ass when you are out there on the court and big tournaments are often almost 2 weeks long.
Football players only play 16 weeks a season, plus 4 preseason and hopefully a couple postseason, but they are practicing and reviewing film for 5 of the other 6 days a week all day long. Call it 21 weeks times 6 days a week and they are working 126 days a year plus 14 or more additional days of training camp.
Baseball, considering the minimal practice and pre-game commitments, really require little more of your time than other sports. Baseball’s most conspicuous downside is the amount of travel required. And for the true goof-off, that can be seen as a blessing. XBox anyone? The ridiculous salary probably makes those travel plans fairly luxurious too.
I’d pick poker first. (I think it does qualify, as you can’t hardly turn on one of the ESPN channels w/o seeing poker.)
Second would be golf. Golf would move into the number 1 position if there was a guarantee that I could make quality time with Michelle Wie.
On the [url=http://chicago.about.com/od/sportsrecreation/a/052806_cubs.htm]Chicago Cubs](]this list[/url) alone, the 20th highest paid player made $1 million dollars. 17 players made over $2 million. That’s just one team, and half those guys sucked! 31 golfers earning over $2 million in the whole sport isn’t exactly impressive compared to baseball.
Actually, in addition to Omniscient’s observation about how much baseball players make, the fact that baseball salaries are simply for playing the game is what would be attractive for me.
I’d prefer to be a big shot in a sport where my income was primarily the direct result of my playing contract. If i were put in the OP’s hypothetical position, i’d look for a sport where i could make my money without whoring myself out to car manufacturers or razor blade companies or investment brokers.
Given a choice between the two options, i’d prefer to make $10 million a year playing baseball than to make $4 million a year playing golf and $12 million a year as an advertising shill.
You realize, i assume, that the E in ESPN stands for Entertainment, or at least it did when the network was started.
Just for reference, the total MLB average payroll is a shade below $3 million per year, there are approx 800 players. That’s 400 players making $3 million compared to only 11 of 256 PGA money winners.
I was just thinking about this. If you can specify position, and psychological stress doesn’t bother you, then I think Hampshire nailed it: NFL kicker. Your season is only six or seven months, and best of all on the road only two nights a month (no other athlete spends only 8-20 days on the road a year!). Your practice is probably a couple hours a day of kicking something, then some relaxing exercises (involving scotch plus the good stuff you get from the trainer). To play, all you do is kick a ball four to ten times, and once every three weeks or so you have to fight off blockers and maybe make a tackle (but nobody blames you if you don’t try very hard). Sure, you might get a burning dead cat on your lawn if you screw up, but you can also be the hero.
Pretty good money, big longetivity. The chick-magnet factor is only mediocre in general, but when you’re the hero, you’re the hero baby. Plus you always have 40 very large guys who want to protect you.
Me? I’d die of simultaneous ulcers and heart disease halfway through the first season, but if you can take the pressure, that’s got to be hands-down the best choice.
Second choice? <Paging Manny Ramirez! Manny Ramirez to the white courtesy phone!>
If you can hit big league pitching, you can have a very happy slackerific life. Only downside is a lot of time on the road, and you have to hang out with baseball players (known more for tobacco chewing and scratching than intellectual discourse).
Be careful of mistaking the Average for the Median.
The latest figures i have in my computer for baseball salaries are for 2006. The average (for 821 listed players), is $2,828,623, but the median (i.e., the half-way point) is $950,000.
So, in 2006 there were 410 guys making $950,000 or more, but there were actually only 257 guys making more than $2.82 million, because the huge salaries of guys like A-Rod, Jeter, Bond, etc. skew the average upwards.
That’s still far more than in golf, but not quite as many as you suggested.
While he does have a good life, Manny is by far the hardest training player on the Sox. He takes extra BP and works out with the hitting coach every morning when they’re in Boston, then goes back home, and comes back in the afternoon to workout with the team. His work ethic (on his hitting anyways) is second to none.
Fielding and baserunning, not so much. But he works very hard on his hitting, and it shows.
Ultimate or disc golf?
Oh, that’s right. There’s no money there.
Yet.
Besides winning the Powerball or any other lottery, I think 8 days of poker for $8,250,000 is a far better bang for the buck for any goof-off…as a matter of fact, there are tons of goof-offs playing poker. How much grueling training did Mr. Yang commit to? Not much; I recall that he has only been playing for a few years. Heck, you can pick up the “sport” when you’re old and grey after you goofed-off for decades…
Is there any baseball player pulling down $1M+ per day? Uh, no.
