Not a chance, at least in the American professional leagues. The reflexes that are required to hit a baseball or block a DB or skate to a puck at a professional level do not come just with practice. People underestimate just how difficult those skills are.
Yeah, but wasn’t that sorta non-contact stuff, more art than sport?
Another point.
Studies of pro hockey players show that most of the them were born in the first half of the year. It makes sense. They are competing against kids born in the same calender year. At an early age, the kids born earlier in the year will have superior strength and coordination compared to their “younger” counterparts. Eventually these kids rise to the top and then dominate the sport. It would be interesting to find if this is true for other sports.
Cite? I guess I could maybe see this making sense for the kids who played in kindergarten and it then starts a chain reaction of confidence, but even at age 5, I can’t see being a few months older making that much of a difference, and definitely not at the high school level and beyond.
I believe there are certain instances where natural “gifts” come into play - Jeff Monson, for instance, is probably the better athlete and more talented fighter than Tim Sylvia, but there’s no way he could overcome an 11" height difference and 50+ pound weight difference in their fight. There were times when Monson had wide open shots, was swinging for the fences, and his fists literally did not reach Sylvia’s face. Lance Armstrong’s VO2 max has been mentioned, and the Thorpedo’s feet come to mind. Far more common, however, is that we normal people with everyday lives just can’t comprehend how hard these people train. Even the guys who “eat whatever they want” and “don’t train” are training a lot more than we could imagine - they’re probably just not training quite as hard as their peers (and this WILL catch up to them with age.)
Even if the average guy might not have the potential to be the next Ian Thorpe, he has the potential to be far, far greater than he probably thinks.
And how many of us would really want to give up nearly everything else in our lives to be really great at one sport? Personally, my interests are too broad.
Top-notch athletes all have exceptional coordination, balance and timing. Without those physical attributes you can become better but you will never play major league baseball, be in the NBA, or on the PGA tour and you won’t win even a bronze medal at the Olympic Games.
Training can improve the talents your are born with. It can make you faster ,if you already are fast. It can help your pitching if you can aready throw hard. But it can not make a weak thrower a good one or make a slow runner into a world class sprinter.
Beleive me, I know about playing hovkey every day. I’m Canadian. LOTS of Canadian boys play every day. They play winter and summer, they play until their parents have to search the neighborhood to find them. But most of them never sniff junior-A, much less the NHL.
Gretzky was being called “The Great One” when he was ten years old, when he scored 378 goals in a 70-game season, and apparently would have scored 600 or more if he’d wanted to but would stop trying to score goals and would just set his teammates up once the game was out of hand. And during the summer, he played baseball, not hockey - and, according to many eyewitnesses, could have been a major league ballplayer if he’d pursued that. He was a scratch golfer within a year of taking that sport up.
Some people are just wired for it. Something about the way Gretzky’s brain is designed gives him a sense of how to play sports.
The “can perform sport-tasks consistently” is the hard part. I’m not exactly uncoordinated, but I am far from athletic. No matter how much I train, or how much I want to, I am never going to be able to hit a ball coming at me at 80 mph. I’m never going to be able to consistently judge where I should be and how fast I need to get there to catch that ball in the outfield.There’s a certain quality that all good athletes have - I’ll call it " body intelligence" that I don’t have. Being able to perform those tasks consistently is a talent in itself.
That can really piss you off if you let it get to you. When I was going to college I lived in a trailer park and a bunch of us played golf. One guy outside the group heard us talking about it and said he had never played and wondered it he could give it a try with us. He had won an event and finish high in a couple of others in the high school division of the Drake Relays. He had also been a member of a basketball team that finished second or third in the state championships.
So, the first time he played he shot somewhere in the low 90’s. For you non-golfers, a good percentage of those who play golf never break 100. In a couple of months he was in the low 80’s and by the end of the semester he was down in the single digit handicap range.
Disgusting.
Wouldn’t a military boot camp be a good example of this not being possible from a practical stand point? Whether in a draft type situation (like Vietnam) or a popular war (say WWII) there are numerouse guys that don’t make the cut (i.e. team) even though they are given plenty of positive and negative reinforement to succede. I’ve seen people who volunteered to go into the service enter in seemingly good physical and mental condition only to come back later with bad knees or bruised psyches.
I would disagree with this. Go spend the next 15 years standing in front of about 500,000 80mph pitches and you would be shocked at how good you are at hitting them.
A lot of it is mental. I’ve beat lots of guys in arm wrestling whom I know for a fact are stronger than me. I just keep my cool and give everything I’ve got to not lose and eventual they wear themselves out and I win. It’s the same with sports - if you know you can find that extra reserve somewhere deep inside of you and you train yourself to tap into it - you’re going to do better than the guy who does nothing but train but has very little mental or emotional resilience when it comes competition time.
Last month I was in a triathlon and one of the competitors was 49 years old and beared a striking resemblance to Phil Margera. He came in the top 50 out of a field of 200+ and I guarantee you that he was in much worse shape than everyone he beat. Hardly anyone else there was even a little bit chunky - this guy was downright obese. He had confidence, though. He placed himself in the top 20 when we lined up for the swim and, yeah, he got passed a few times, but appearences obviously didn’t mean much to this guy.
If you look at American professional athletes and those contending in other elite sports such elite activities as the Olympic you will notice that there are two factors. One is body type and genes. A guy who is 5’3’’ obviously isn’t going to have a good chance in the NBA but it goes well beyond that. People have different levels of endurance, the right types of muscles for that sport, and no extreme predisposition to injury that cause them to leave competition.
The other factor is the dedication to practice and work hard at the sport to make it to the elite levels. This part is usually essential as well but it causes confusion when people read how hard X worked to get to where he/she is. The implication becomes that most people that applied themselves just that hard could achieve the same thing.
That part is not true. What is happening is that there are a lot of people with the right genes and a lot of people with the right willingness to train relentlessly necessary to succeed in a given elite sport but it takes the intersection of both to succeed in an elite major sport. That combination is mostly not under the control of individuals. An analogy is saying that people work hard to become doctors. Noble Prize winners work even harder therefore any child should be able to become a doctor with some work and a Noble Prize winner with a little more.
The notion is insulting to those that are trying their hardest even with expert help at the lower levels of elite sports. Many college football players at Division II schools would love to transfer to Division I. Likewise, second string quarterbacks are continually trying to improve to get the first seat at any team, even the worst one and minor league baseball teams are filled with people that have no other goal or purpose other than to start in a Major League Game one day. Most of these will never make it although they were the best of the best where they came from before and have no barriers other than their own abilities.
The people that are stars in elite sports today tend to be freaks of nature and psychology.
The main skill that can contribute to being a successful athlete is speed. There are all kind of cliches I’ve heard from when I played sports in high school about “speed kills” or how “You can’t coach/teach speed.” I know a few guys that played college sports at the Division II level, but may have competed against Division I guys, or pros in camps or pick-up games. The common theme when you ask about the level of talent, is just how fast everything happens with the really talented players. They move so much faster than “regular” people that it isn’t even a contest. This is why you’ll see blow outs when a Top 10 NCAA team will play some small school.
Speed could probably be improved with training, but you can only do so much. A natural gift for speed (or vision, in the case of Gretzky, Bird, et al) is required in almost all cases. Of course it doesn’t guarantee success, as some of the fastest people in track or other sports aren’t able to transition to something like football or baseball, but their exceptional speed is still enough to get them a try out, where the average person won’t get a second glance.
There was an article by the Freakonomics guys in The New York Times a while back, called A Star Is Made.
It was a study of elite soccer players. If I remember right, it found that most of them were born earlier in the year. This wasn’t necessarily because talented people are usually born earlier in the year, but because of age cutoffs for youth soccer leagues. Kids born earlier in the year are usually more physically developed than kids born later in the year that would just make the cutoff. Therefore, the older kid, even if only by a few months, would make the team and then get kind of a virtuous (vicious?) cycle going where they’re playing against the top talent, and continue to develop and improve, so they keep making the select teams and keep playing against other talented players.
The article does come down in favor of the idea that you can train yourself to be talented, or even exceptional at selected tasks if you work hard. Although it does seem to make a point that, as I stated above, some natural talent is needed to be truly great.
I’ve spent 20 years throwing a bowling bowl. The highest I ever averaged was 162-(last year). My son averaged that by the age of 11. He didn’t bowl any more games than I did.He is also a very good baseball player, a good golfer and okay at pick-up basketball and hockey. He is a naturally talented athlete- I am not.
Yeah. As has been noted, Joe DiMaggio didn’t make spectacular diving catches in the outifeld. The ball always came right to him. Funny how that happens. One favorite saying after a spectacular catch by a player, “DiMaggio would have been waitin’ for it.”
There is, for example, this reference in a Scientific American article on “The Expert Mind” (this quote is from page 5):
The point being that the physical advantage of a few months extra development at age 7 is more significant than that same age differential at 25.
Regarding the OP - I am in complete agreement with those who have said that physical gifts are one necessary component of sports prowess. And if professional sports people didn’t think so too, then they wouldn’t 1) be willing to pay the outrageous salaries to top stars and 2) be willing to wait a year or more for some reconstructive surgeries or other rehabilitation in order to get a star player back from injury.
But your cite is a counter-argument to that. It shows how valuable hard work, confidence (a huge part of the mental game), and devotion to one’s sport is.
I’m not saying that everyone is born equal and on a level playing field, but I think development and psychology are much larger aspects than they get credit for.
There are no formerly-fat, slovenly schlubs with superior intellect and will among the top athletes in any sport anywhere in the world.
The problem is that “top athlete” isn’t defined against some standard that anyone can work towards. It is a percentile score against the entire population first and then within the players in a given sport. All players in all U.S. professional sports will already have been selected to be well over the 99th percentile of all players in their sport. Being just within the best 1% may sound impressive but even that isn’t close to being a top athlete in my mind. The top 1% in some sport get produced by most high schools all the time. There are many levels to go above that before someone is even qualified to sit on the bench of a major sports franchise. Assuming that person becomes a starter, there are many levels still remaining to become a superstar. The majority of people get cut at any given level.
This point becomes important when you look at most sports over time. Real records and performance records are continually being pushed to new levels and even player performance overall has increased markably in most sports over the past few decades.
So yes, we can take a given child and give him the best training and the best nutrition and make him a better athlete. The problem is that lots of other people are doing that as well, so an individuals position on the bell–curve still won’t shift much.
It takes both natural gifts and dedication to produce an elite athlete. Occasionally you will find someone that depends way more than the usual on one factor or the other both both are still there. Superstars like Michael Jordan are usually at the very top of both physical talent and dedication to improving. In fact, superstar athletes like Michael Jordan who try and fail to succeed at another sport indicate that some people are just better suited to a particular sport.
BO frakkin’ JACKSON!
2-Sport All Star