Of course this is a subjective matter, but wth. Anecdotal stuff I’ve heard: Dan Marino blew the Wonderlic and was/is a bit of a nitwit in all things, the Philadelphia Eagles had to drop most of the playbook when Randall Cunningham couldn’t pick it up, etc. Both were terrifically talented, successful athletes, but… . Who else ya got?
Rex Grossman!
How bout O.J.? Ron Mexico? Juan Pablo Montoya?
Dexter Manley went to Oklahoma for 4 years and was an NFL All-Pro.
The man had 18.5 sacks one season. he could read an offense like nobody’s business.
Problem was, he couldn’t read “The Cat in the Hat” because he was illiterate.
Mike Tyson doesn’t have the brains given to a firefly.
Nice… student athletes my ass… :rolleyes:
And a big old fuck you to his elementary, junior high and high school teachers too. I have often heard about great student athletes being given a pass on academics, but where the hell were this guy’s 1st & 2nd grade teachers?!?
Or his parents?
Way to insult our firefly friends! What’d they ever do to you? 
Rube Waddell, turn of the 20th century Hall of Fame pitcher, would likely be labeled as having mental retardation if he were a young athlete today.
In a similar vein, wasn’t Shoeless Joe Jackson a bit on the slow side?
Illiterate, for sure. I think he was only able to make a mark on his “confession” because he couldn’t write his name. Of course, he had to rely on someone else to tell him what he was signing, since he couldn’t read it…
Is Lawrence Taylor stupid, or just brain-damaged and drug-addled? Not snark, but a serious question…
Plenty of functional illiterates are able to fake it quite convincingly. And illiteracy says nothing about a person’s intelligence; it can be due to things like dyslexia or other learning disabilities that have no effect on general intelligence. Manley may have been quite smart other than not being able to read.
For stupid, I nominate Dave Kingman. He hit a lot of home runs, but very little else (he has the lowest BA ever to lead a league in home runs – .204 – and also led the league in strikeouts). The problem is that Kingman thought he had to pull every ball that came his way, and refused to try to occasionally go to the opposite field. If Kingman had tried that, he would have hit over 500 home runs and been a HOF candidate. As it is, he won’t be. He was also a noted asshole off the field.
Brain damaged, from collisions and being coked out for two decades. Once upon a time, he was bright, funny and engaging. 
Tyson is a fairly intelligent and articulate man, very much so compared to most boxers - there are masses of guys you would name ahead of him in the dumb athlete league.
Football player Wayne Rooney appears to be an imbecile. He is very nervous when speaking on camera though, so it is hard to say if his stupidity is truly world class.
I agree that Tyson has serious shortcomings in the areas of impulse control and social skills, but I never thought he was flat-out dumb. You want a dumb boxer? Try an interview with Evander Holyfield or Zab Judah.
The correct answer is Magic Johnson for anyone who has ever heard him speak. He can’t even talk coherently on the sport he’s played his whole life. And why do sports shows keep giving him work? How this guy hasn’t been rendered penniless by stupidty is a miracle.
Tyson is actually pretty well read and has a decent vocabulary which he tends to use correctly.
Really? Then he must have hella good business advisers, because he’s doing just fine off the court.
LT was bright, funny and engaging? Holy shit… :eek:
Worse than that, how he got a talk show, after anybody involved met him, is beyond me. Sportshows are bad enough, but something like a talk show that reaches a wider audience by definition and involves topics beyond sports doesn’t automatically say “Magic Johnson” on any day of the week.
Like EJsGirl said, he probably has very good and trustworthy advisors around him, which help keep him financial solvent.
Right now for dumbest, my vote goes for Michael Vick.
Agreed- and lucky for him.
Traditionally, sumo recruits new wrestlers at 15, when they finish junior high school (the legal minimum). While in previous generations this wouldn’t necessarily mean they were stupid, now that a college degree is widely considered the bare minimum the ones who go to sumo are more likely to be kids who either show an incredible amount of talent at a young age, or who don’t have much prospect of finishing school anyway.
Making matters worse, the sumo association recently did away with the rule that college wrestlers entering the pros get an automatic bye into one of the mid-level divisions. Now they have to start with the 15-year-olds and spend a couple of years working their way up. Since a sumo wrestler’s career is usually over around age 30, this makes the prospect much less inviting to a 22-year-old college grad.
The sumo association, however, appears to be aware of this shortcoming, and keeps unsupervised media time for the wrestlers to an absolute minimum (not to mention quickly yanking press passes for anyone embarrassing a wrestler with difficult questions). For it’s part, NHK (the public network that broadcasts all the tournaments) keeps all post-match interviews to questions that can be answered with “yes”, “no”, “gonna do my best” and “thanks.”
There are a good number who are very well-spoken and seem fairly intelligent: Chiyonofuji, Mainoumi, Terao, and others who frequently do color commentary during tournaments. On the opposite end recently has been Takasago, a former wrestler and now 50-something master of the Takasago stable, which current grandmaster Asashoryu wrestles out of. Asashoryu had a minor flip-out which has ballooned into a major meltdown ending with him having a nervous breakdown and fleeing the country. Takasago now has to come up with answers for what’s going on, and at every press conference so far he’s looked like a 12-year-old D-student who didn’t study and now has to give a presentation in front of the class. He can’t string three words together, can’t produce a coherent thought, can’t explain himself, and most of all can’t stop looking like he’s absolutely terrified.
Well, stupid is as stupid does.
I mean, Yogi Berra has about the equivalent of a 7th grade education, constantly mangles the English language, and has said dozens of idiotic things that have become legendary.
So, is he stupid? Well, it so happens, he’s a VERY sharp businessman who’s made tens of millions since his playing career ended.
We should all be as stupid as Yogi.