Really? Most of the Globetrotters are lower-level college players chosen more for their personalities than for playing ability. Some of them are really old, too. They also don’t play real basketball - half of their time is spent on trick shots and physical comedy. The two Globetrotters who were on The Amazing Race a season or two ago were from small southern colleges and neither got within a country mile of the NBA.
Syracuse did lose Carmelo Anthony that year, but they were still a very good team, a five seed in the NCAA tournament.
Not likely at all. The concept of a “natural” is for movies. Tennis players (pros) in particular are groomed from an early age in special academies where they train and go to school. The kids at the recent Little League World Series, of which one or two might make the majors, spent their entire spring and summer playing baseball. Tiger Woods was on TV at the age of two showing off his golfing prowess. Even someone like Usain Bolt, who just runs fast, was working with elite coaches and competing internationally at age 15.
Athletes train constantly from a very young age to get to the top levels. They don’t spend their summers sitting around the pool or working on cars. I heard Michael Plelp’s coach say that he’s seen dozens of guys in Baltimore with the body types to be great swimmers, but it was just wasted potential because they didn’t get/do the required training at a young age.
To answer the OP, and to complete my first ever consecutive triplepost, no, I wouldn’t be able to score a point even when I was in my prime as a college athlete.
I think that there may be a couple of people who have posted that could, but those are restricted to the current highly competitive amatuers.
I worked in college at a country club, and one of my jobs was to maintain the clay courts. I saw a lot of competitions being played among very good young players. The head pro was a guy in his early thirties, so well past his prime, who had played with Jimmy Connors at UCLA in the 70’s. One morning another head pro from the area who had played professionally was over for a friendly match. My jaw dropped when I saw these guys at it. Talk about a different game. It wasn’t just the serves, but the speed and the accuracy and the ability to hit shots from any angle that amazed me. And to think that these guys were, professionally speaking, a has-been and a never-was.
I think there’s a huge difference between winning a point and winning a game (which is 4 points, winning at least 4-2, 5-3, 6-4, etc.). I’m sure I’d get shut out by any pro 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 with no contest. But winning a single point or multiple points scattered throughout the match is very likely, and I’m sure you could do it, too. People make errors! They may double fault, have a random mishit, or try something too fancy (esp. when they’re up by a huge margin). I’ve faced 120+ mph serves before, and they’re quite scary, but the second serves will come in at 100 mph or slower, and that’s quite returnable for good amateurs if they’re not very well placed. Sure, a lot WILL be very well placed, and you may still outright miss the majority of them, but at least in my experience, you start to adapt if they’re consistently coming in at those speeds. And once you get racket on them enough times, you’ll have an OOPS return ace at some point, since most of the pace has already been generated by their monster serve and you’ll eventually get lucky by hitting it at the right angle.
Anyway, that’s just my anecdotal observations against someone who had a medium-low professional-grade serve. I’ll make no claims about facing, say, top 10 players, who themselves have been known to 6-0, 6-0 the lower-ranked professional players!
There is a world of difference between teaching pros (typically rated 4.5 - 5.5) and playing pros (not officially rated, but the tennis rating program says that world-class players are regarded to be 7.0).
I played the amateur ranks for a while when I was younger and did pretty well. I had a decent serve. A girl friend of mine got suckered into a doubles bet with a ringer. She asked me if I would show up at the club and ask for a rematch at twice the stakes. It was a bluff, neither of us thought I could really make a difference. After the cat was out of the bag and we all had a good laugh, the pro asked me to play a game for the hell of it. I knew I didn’t have a chance at winning but thought I wouldn’t embarrass too much. I didn’t (successfully) return a single serve. And this was a low ranking pro.
Pros don’t look as impressive as they really are because they are playing other pros. I doubt that anyone in this thread could score a point in the US Open. If your opponent knew you weren’t nationally ranked they would not double fault.
On the other hand, the Globetrotters did lose to Michigan State in 2000, and Syracuse has a habit of not treating their exhibition games with respect (see: Division II LeMoyne College 82, Syracuse 79 in 2009). In essence Syracuse cleared the bench in the LeMoyne game, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they did that against the Globetrotters too. “Faster, taller semi-pro players beat college second-team by 13 points” honestly isn’t a big surprise.
No, I don’t think I could score a single point unless I happened to luck into one by way of a silly unforced error. I certainly couldn’t score on the merits of my skill. I’m just a casual recreational player, and not a very good one at that.
My anecdote: My father-in-law is a very high-level tennis player in China, where he plays competitively in national-level, senior age group tournaments. A month or so ago he played in an invitational tournament in Japan. He stayed with us for a few months last winter, and one of my wife’s friends is a member of a tennis club. The friend brought him to the club as a guest several times, where he beat everyone he played, including the club pro. The only one who came close to hanging with him was this one teenager, who was regarded as a phenom destined for the pro circuit.
I’ve never played a real, complete match against him, but he has taken me out to the court to show me some things. When he really turns it on, I cannot score against him. It’s just not possible. On top of that, he’s 20 years older than me, too. I don’t see how I could do any better against a tour pro in their prime.
Even if that were true, you’d be assuming that they would not brick a single return off your own serves, which is highly doubtful over the course of a best 3 of 5 sets match. And not all of their returns will be outright winners, which means you have another chance on some points to force another error.
Sustained perfection is really hard, even for pros, I will submit.
I’m a high 4.0 player, been to sectionals a couple of different times in both women’s and mixed. I play at least three times a week. No, I sincerely doubt I could actually win a point of a US Open player.
I think that the pros make it look so easy that we forget how much skill and talent it really takes to perform at that level.
I think returning a serve would basically be akin to trying to get a hit off a Major League pitcher. At best, you might get wood on the ball or “foul one off,” but your chances of getting it back over the net and inbounds are next to nothing, and even if you did, you could never get it past them, and you’d get crushed on their own return.
The only hope at all would be to get lucky with a fluke ace, but I think even the odds of that are pretty low. Even if you could place one perfectly, your pace would still be so comically slow (from their perspective) that it wouldn’t matter. I think the odds might be similar to throwing a strke (not a strike out, just a single strike) against a Major League hitter. Maybe if you threw 500 of your best fastballs against them they might miss one or foul one off, but probably not. What you’d be throwing at them would be too slow to be capable of challenging them. Out 500 pitches, they’re going to put at least 499 in the parking lot, and probably 500, but if you get enough reps, they’ll eventually miss one.
If we’re talking about pro men’s first serves, I can see your point. But I’ve returned serves (at a low percentage) that were in the 110-120 mph range, which is well above a lot of their second serves. I suppose the coach I was playing with could have been lying about or misjudging the speed, but I know for a fact that he had coached ATP professionals (no one better than rank 50 or so), and that he claimed that his serve (and no other part of his game) was good enough to hang at the lower professional level.
The serves WERE mostly a blur, and if they had good placement, I had no chance. But some were placed within a step or two of my hitting zone, and after a while (a ton of aces and unreturned serves later), I began to adapt and return a few of them. By chance I also hit a couple of return winners. It probably did help that he was giving me pointers the whole time (the only reason he was playing me was because I’d done his niece a big favor).
On my serve, I did win a fair number of points (though he still won the vast majority of them), but that doesn’t really prove anything, since he made no claim about his ground game, and I doubt he was trying his hardest. Also, I think he was way more in coaching mode during my service games, since we were actually having rallies. But he said that he wasn’t holding back on his serve, because I asked him not to, and probably because he didn’t mind getting the match over with more quickly!
Then again, he could have just been trying to make me feel good about myself; I’ll never know…
I played in high school, and in my tiny town was regarded as pretty good (which shouldn’t mean anything to anyone, really). I’d get schooled so fast, it wouldn’t be funny. Not a chance.
I’d like to say that back then, I could hang with them for a point, but it’s just not realistic. No way.
My 15 years older and haven’t picked up a raquet in years self today would have even less of a chance.
Probably not. But against a shlub like me they wouldn’t have to worry about pushing hard so theoretically they would be much less likely to double fault. They could go easy on their first serve, knowing that I’d still be fairly unlikely to return it.
I still think that would be my best chance to score a point.
If you have a decent serve, there’s a probably a very good chance they would mess up at least one return over the course of 3 full sets, even if it goes 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.