The thought is wrong (imho) and not the poster! My last comment was poorly written.
There’s a lot more running in footie than there is in either Rugy or GAA. The action tends to stop a lot more often in both of those games than it does in soccer.
In addition, there are a lot of elbows, knocked-heads and other injuries asociated with people in close proximity moving at speed. It’s also about proportion. A 50-50 tackle might do more damage to a 5’9 160lb man than it would for a 6’4 280lb man.
For team sports, I’d vote for rugby players. The comparison with American Football players is specious: in the latter you play for 30 seconds or less and then there are massive substitutions - a very stop-start game - whereas rugby is a free-flowing game with very limited substitutions and once a player has been substituted, he can’t usually come back on.
I’m not sure that’s relevant though. There’s plenty of stops in Rugy or other times when players are simply walking around. Again, I point to the fact that unless you have the ball you are very unlikely to be tackled or even touched in Rugby.
Boxers only fight for three minute rounds, does that mean they aren’t tough?
Again, huh?! No, you won’t be tackled unless you have the ball, but there’s a huge amount of contact between forwards. ("Q: What’s the difference between a ruck and a maul? A: Two weeks in traction.)
Although my vote would go to boxing, I don’t think that this debate is complete without a mention of lacrosse. All the violence of Ice Hockey with the addition of the fact that you have both feet on solid ground when you hit someone… plus those sticks make pretty good cudgels.
I’d go with mountain climbers, most especially Reinhold Messner. His accomplishments include (though certainly are not limited to):
First ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen
First (and thus far only) true solo ascent of Everest (also without SO)
First to climb all fourteen 8000-meter peaks (all without SO)
Solo hike to North Pole
Solo hike across Antarctica (by way of South Pole)
Yes, I’ve played it a few times though I admit it wasn’t even up to the level of an amateur league. I stand by my statement, the folks in rugby just don’t hit one another like they do in American football. When I played football I’d get hit in every single play whether or not I was anywhere near the ball and that wasn’t something I’d experienced or observed with rugby.
Marc
That’s what I call an unauthorized biography! 
If we imagine “toughest” to mean, “we lock the players up in a room, and only one, the toughest, comes out” then I’d go for the martial artists, because that’s what they train for. I’m just not sure who’d win. I’d imagine wrestlers (real wrestling as seen in college and the Olympics rather than the fake kind) might do best, because all a wrestler has to do is get in close enough to their opponent to grapple, and it’s all over Then again, boxers have tremendous hand speed, upper body strength and stamina, and it might not be all that easy to grapple with them if they didn’t want to be grappled with.
Anecdotally speaking:
I played five years of [American] football as a starting running back, and two of those as also a starting linebacker. I played eleven years of rugby [Union, not League]. I also played two years of hockey.
Although my most serious injuries were from playing football (sprained ankles, two seperated shoulders), I found rugby to be far more grueling than either of the other two. Hockey required the most physical exertion (with only multiple-matches-per-day squash tournaments coming close), but rugby matches took far more out of me than anything else.
My vote:
Triatheletes. That’s some crazy sh*t.
By athletes are we limiting ourselves to sports? I’d think Navy Seals, Army Special Forces, Russian Spetsnaz, etc. are pretty tough athletes, can survive under grueling conditions, with injuries, and keep going.
Most pro-athletes can’t perform miracles outside their particular element. Stick 'em in a jungle, or 40 degree water, and see how long they remain tough. Triathletes are up there with these guys.
I’ve seen men nearly broken in half in American football. Injuries so bad that you’d swear the guy was hit by a truck. If those guys didn’t have pads, and hit the way they do in the NFL, there’d be deaths every single game. Every one of them. Hell, this wasn’t even in the NFL, but last year’s helmet-on-helmet hit in the Georgia-Auburn game (I don’t remember the GA player’s name, but Carlos Rogers of Auburn delivered the hit) looked for a few minutes like it killed two people.
A lot of good cases have been made for various athletes being the strongest, or having the most endurance, or being best equipped to inflict or absorb injury. But the question of who’s toughest, in the sense we commonly use the term, was settled a long time ago: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038000321X/002-5235064-1727206?v=glance&n=283155
I believe it was a fly half named Felice.
I’m sorry but Rugby isn’t even in the discussion with football. The “they wear pads” argument is ignorant, the simple fact is that those pads cut both ways. They are weapons as much as they are protection, a helmet and shoulder pads are much harder and cause more damage than their analogous uncovered body parts do.
More importantly here are some of the illegal and “dangerous play” rules for rugby:
Bolding mine. Now, I’m not saying Rugby is for pussies, it’s a tough game, but it just doesn’t compare to football when it comes to collisions and injury risk. It surpasses football from an endurance standpoint. But as you can see, the rules of the game explicitly prohibit the kind of contact that is a fundamental component of every single play in a football game. The equivalent of rucks and mauls take place on every snap at the line, except they are engaged at speed from a distance.
Nothing wrong with rugby, but two guys runnig in opposite directions colliding at full speed is something totally unique to football.
Incidentally, GorillaMan, it’s not even close to say rugby players are of “equally intimidating size”. According to this article from 2003 the average NFL player is 245 lbs. Much bigger than your 218 lb mark, and the heaviest clocks in at 390 lbs. If you factor out kickers who are on the field in a limited capacity the average weight right at 250 lbs.
A little more googling: England currently have a pack averaging over 240lb, and Fiji’s team average over 250. And the heaviest ever player, Bill Cavabuti, is on the bulky side of 360lb. So I stand by my assertion.
And do you really get anything like a maul in American football?
Strongmen. These guys are rolling cars on a course and pulling trucks and trains with a harness.
I played football in High school and when I was at West Point I was on the rugby team.
Rugby is grueling and tiring, it can be quite painful, you may get punched, crushed, kneed, etc. But football is an entirely different situation.
Football is impact, rugby is rough and tumble. Rugby is like a bar room brawl, football is like a game of chicken except instead of two cars slamming into each other it’s two people.
Watch this all the way through for anyone who is unfamiliar with football. Some of the earlier hits aren’t that impressive but you see some crazy ones later on. Also keep in mind that while the video may not convey this accurately, typically these hits involve strong, highly athletic men moving at the absolute maximum speed they possibly can when they collide with the other player.
Not precisely since it’s generally illegal for a teammate to push a ball carrier forward (though rarely enforced) though there was a case in the big USC-Notre Dame game (college football, not pro) this year where it happened on the goalline as time expired…no penatly called. Also, if a runner loses possesion of the ball it’s a much greater disadvantage for the offense than doing so in rugby. Therefore a maul-like situation is very risky for the offense and it’d typically prefer to get to the ground to reset the play. To futher complicate matters, at the referee’s discretion he can stop the play if there is no forward progress of the ball, which would make a rugby-style maul very short lived.
Anyways, the more common analogy would be a running play in which the offensive and defensive lines charge together, then the running back carries the ball at full speed into the back of the scrimmage hoping to press through.
I think the fact that the two lines (averaging about 310 lbs) start in opposite directions on the snap together and the back is at full speed when he meets the scrimmage makes the impacts and risk more severe than in a typical maul which is mostly pushing and not crashing together.
It’s also worth mentioning that in the early days of football pads, helmets, weren’t that standard. In 1905 football was being played by several universities across the United States (but it was nowhere near as widespread as it is today.) And in that year, 18 people were killed in football games. President Theodore Roosevelt said that universities had to get the game under control or he would support legislation that would make playing football a crime. This is where a lot of the rules to increase safety (and the eventual adoption of full pads and helmets) came into play.
The pads/helmets were put in because the alternative was having a sport where death of the competitors wasn’t an uncommon happening.