Yes, it is stupid. Any sport that has a two-inch thick playbook must be for total idiots.
In baseball, you might get away with a decent glove and being able to just naturally react to a pitched ball, and in basketball, you can get away (a little) with just being able to shoot the heck out of the ball, but in football, no matter how fast you are or how hard you hit, you’ll get cut if you can’t remember your assignment for the dozens and dozens of plays that your team has.
Admittedly, you individually may have fewer possible assignments than that, but try being an offensive back, and your number goes up quite a bit.
At the top level of any sport, they are all great athletes. Sentiments like amarone’s are completely off base. Those offensive linemen weighing 300 lbs. can outrun many of the better HS track runners.
I played basketball in HS against Ralph Sampson (a top college player but an average pro) and he could have started at guard for any team we played that year. He was that good. The idea that a person who is just big or tall can automatically play a sport well is just nonsense.
I know there are some top level athletes on these boards who would concur (Boo Boo Foo and a guy who played bball for GA Tech come to mind).
That’s easy to say. As per earlier posts: if it’s so easy, why can’t any tall dude lace on a pair of shoes and do it? I’m four inches taller than Allen Iverson, but if I played one-on-one with him he’d humiliate me and mock me while he was doing it. Obviously, some skills must be involved.
If NBA players weren’t skilled, they’d be put out of a job in a week by guys who WERE skilled. At the rate of pay they make, people are motivated to take their jobs.
This is true of any major pro sport; the people who play it are overwhelmingly EXTREMELY skilled. If they weren’t, one of 10,000 guys who are practicing their guts out right now would take their jobs. There are, obviously, physical prerequisites; a 180 pound man cannot be an NFL offensive tackle no matter what he does. But a 300 pound man had better know a shitload about football, and had better be as quick as a cat and be able to move his feet like a ballet dancer and have the handwork of a good wrestler to be able to play in the NFL. These are not the 300-pound dudes you see at Weight Watchers; they’re FAST. Why would anyone say weighing 300 pounds makes you unusual? Have you looked in a McDonald’s lately? I know a lot of guys pushing 300 pounds and I don’t see any of them suiting up for this Sunday’s games. They aren’t skilled enough.
A hockey player pretty much has to be fit and trim and at least 170-180 pounds, but shit, that includes me and I can’t play in the NHL. The guys that do spend half their damned lives on the ice. They skate as easily as you and I walk (Pro hockey players are better fundamental skaters than Olympic figure skaters.) The guys who play baseball in the major leagues have faced tens of thousands of live pitches. As Michael Jordan proved, if you don’t face all those pitches you can be the most natural athlete around and they’ll still laugh you out of the batter’s box. One split second slow recognizing the slider, and you’re a loser.
Same with soccer. A soccer player has to be very fit, a fast runner, and have a good cardiovascular system. Fine. But, that happens to describe a lot of people who DIDN’T spend nine hours a day kicking the ball around a pitch. That describes Carl Lewis, and you don’t see him at the World Cup. He can’t play soccer for shit compared to folks who DID spend half their childhoods playing soccer. At the premiere level if you are half a second slower than your opponent, if your footwork is 2% worse, you’re as good as unemployed.
Beg to differ. He was such a phenomenaly gifted athlete that he never had to work hard, and when faced with equally talented folks for the first time, he gave up.
Here are Sampson’s pro statistics. He scored 21, 22.1 and 18.9 points a game his first three years to go along with 11.1, 10.4 and 11.1 rebounds a game. And he had two more years where he was still quite valuable before everything went to hell.
I’ve seen these arguments before, often based on “the hardest act in professional sport is hitting a fastball” and have often thought someone should be able to come up with a way to objectively judge skill levels in different sports.
Recently I read Seabiscuit (terrific book by the way) and Laura Hillenbrand says
She quotes other research and equates race riding to much like squatting on the grille of a car while it speeds down a twisting, potholed freeway in traffic.
I would love to see the work of the LA boffins but can’t locate it.
Not taking away from your point or anything (I agree with you), but I’m pretty sure that this is false. Maybe I’m nitpicking, but I ran track in H.S. (and I’m currently running in college) and I know that I’d be put to shame by any of the other guys that qualified for state last year. My fastest time in 400 is a 49.3 which works out to about a 4.48 40 yd dash (49.3/11). By this time, I’m an average runner and couldn’t even dream of keeping up with the guy that won state (he ran a 46.15 which is about a 4.195 in the 40). There’s no way any O-Lineman is hitting 4.195 in the 40 (or even a 4.48). Linebackers are a different story though…
Maybe completely off base if you choose to completely misinterpret what I said. I did not say that large basketball and football players are not great athletes. I did not say that someone who is just big or tall can automatically play a sport well.
I was saying that in some pro sports, basketball in particular, skill cannot compensate for lack of physical size. I think that soccer is more skillful because players of any height (weight is a matter of choice) can play at the highest level if they are skillful enough.
I think the details of the particular sporting activity are irrelevant. It just depends on how much society rewards players of that sport. If top tiddlywinks players could earn $20 million a year, you would need to be quite extraordinarily good at tiddlywinks to reach the top. Every bit as skilful, in your own way, as top soccer or basketball players. As it is, nobody makes a living playing tiddlywinks and consequently skill levels are lower.
Of course it takes great skill to play soccer or association football or whatever they call it. Using one’s feet to control a ball is extremely difficult and requires a great about of practice and dexterity. My problem with soccer is that what is so difficult to do with one’s feet is relatively simple to do with one’s hands. I (as well as most correct thinking Americans :)) prefer to do things the easy way, rather than going out of my way to make a game unnecessibly difficult.
Basketball, baseball, American tackle football, golf and tennis are difficult enough to master without handicapping oneself by prohibiting use of our most useful human attributes. It takes skill to play soccer, certainly. It just isn’t a skill that’s very important to me.
It’s easier to run with the ball in your hands than it is to dribble in basketball, but it takes great skill to dribble really well alot more skill than is required to keep possesion of the ball when it’s in your hands.
I’d also say that you can kick a ball alot further, faster than you can throw it.
You know what, I hate hockey and for that matter I can’t watch soccer too long on TV. But to say that neither requires skill on the level of other pro sports would be DUMB.
I’ve played a lot of basketball and soccer (God, I hate using that name for football) and I have to say that I find soccer both more entertaining and skillfull than basketball. It is also a hell of a lot more difficult. There is sprinting in basketball, yes, but nothing that comes close to the exertion of a 90 minute match on a full-size soccer field.
And speaking of size - Tyrone Bogues and many others have succeeded in NBA despite being under 6 feet tall, I do not find this strange as their lower points of gravity give them better ball-handling and they are faster than most others on the field just to name two advantages. I do, however, remember Gheorge Muresan, a 7’7" center from Romania. He didn’t know the game when he was “discovered” but since he was a giant he got a crash course in basketball and voila! He became the least skillfull pro athlete in the world…
I think Robert Wadlow used to play basketball, now there’s a player I would have liked to see…