I’m going to have to go with Boxing. It requires extreme levels of strength training, endurance training, and skill acquisition (to say nothing of pain endurance and fearlessness).
I’d also suggest that being an elite Middle Linebacker in American football is exceptionally difficult. You have to be fast and agile enough to chase down running backs with sprinter-like speed, strong enough to play sumo with with 350 lb. lineman, and smart enough to read offenses, call plays, and direct your teammates within a few seconds.
I see where the OP is coming from and why there is debate on it. It’s all about barriers to entry. Running has a low barrier, while something like polo or hockey has a high barrier.
The crucial bit is that depending on where you are in the spectrum decides how “tough” the sport will be. If you’re a poor African, polo is impossible to be elite in, so it is clearly much tougher than running. OTOH, if you’re a socialite and can afford polo, running is much tougher, since you’re competing with everyone in the world rather than just your economic group. So no single answer.
That was partially my point, though, although maybe not articulated well. A QB cannot become elite simply by throwing a football over and over through a tire, he needs to be in a structured system for much of his development and that is lacking.
Hockey shifts last an average of about 45 seconds for a forward, not 2 minutes as somebody said. Maybe a minute for defencemen.
While the actual body on body contact is greater in American Football, no where in the NFL can you grab a piece of wood and slash someone on the wrist/leg/arm/back. You can in hockey, you might get a little 2 minute penalty for it, but usaully not. Not to mention the cross checking.
While you can slam someone into the ground in football, let me tell you the boards don’t exactly tickle.
All in all I would say the physical aspect of hockey/football is about even.
Lacrosse is also a very difficult sport to play, a lot of running, bodychecking is allowed, the play on basically hockey rinks with no ice (indoor lacrosse at least, outdoor plays on a field normally), and cross-checking/slashing is allowed!
However, I would say the most difficult sport to play may very well be Elephant Polo. Where can most people get an Elephant in this world?
Hey, hey, HEY. I may not know as much as y-o-u, but let’s be a little more tactful than declaring I have “absolutely no idea” about stuff – 'kay?
1- Having recently spent a little time in a bike shop recently talking to enthusiasists far more into it than me, I still say racing bikes are expensive. So perhaps years before you get sponsored, you’ll be investing out of pocket on, perhaps, affordable high-end but still butt-expensive bikes.
2-I currently weigh 280. So, I might be equivocating but bikers of all stripes seem pretty goddamn “lean” t’me. I’ve never seen a professional biker with a build like Evander Holyfield or appear to weigh more than, say, 165 pounds.
3- For absolute clarity I should have typed, “certain seasonal weather conditions” as I don’t remember seeing any bike racing/training in wintertime. In the American midwest, that could last five months.
4- When did I ever say anything about the European upper class, RedFury?
There were only 10 ever built, weighing in at over 120 tons and needing a crew of at least 20, and up to 32.
There are only a couple left in the world now, and they do put on the occasional race.
I don’t think many people in the world could afford one, we are talking extremely serious amounts of cash just to pay for the marine grade varnish on the woodwork!
Or, how about hot air ballooning around the world? The sport of billionaires…
But it isn’t the boards/ground that causes the massive impact. It is the 260+ pound man slamming down on top of a player, driving him into the ground. Gravity is a bitch. That is what is missing in hockey. (With good reason…ice is very hard.)
As for the weaponization of hockey, yes, the players do have weapons. But those cause wounds, not injuries. Most of those wounds can be stitched up and the player may not even miss a shift.* Football is chock full of injuries, which prevent any player from playing any sport. I’d rather suffer a gashed face than a shattered knee.
Hockey certainly has more blood, but football has far more violence. (Neither are even in the same league as boxing, though.)
Just wanted to point out that I have seen this happen, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for these guys. One guy was getting his ear stitched up (back on), and the whole time was yelling about the penalty – cleary pissed off – which was jerking his head around. The poor guy stitching his ear up had trouble keeping up with the ear. Hockey players are freaks.
Regarding the OP, a distinction should be made in team sports about position. I’ve heard it said that the easiest way to become an NFL player is to be a long-snapper, because nobody wants to do it (as it’s usually your only job) and every team needs at least one.
But compare the long-snapper to the other NFL positions cited, like QB and MLB. There is a world of difference in the difficulty of being elite at those positions.
Similarly in hockey, I am guessing. How hard is it to be goalie? I imagine it’s all but impossible to train the reflexes needed…you either have it or you don’t. (I could be wrong, and welcome corrections if so.) Compared to a defensemen, or better yet, the “goon”, there is another world of difference in difficulty at becoming elite.
In baseball, hitting is hitting, but becoming an elite pitcher is something else altogether. Which is easier? I have no earthly idea. (Little help, RickJay?)
So if the OP’s criteria is maintained to include any part of a sport, I think that all but eliminates all team sports with specialized positions, because you have to concede that the easiest position to master is still an elite player in the sport.
If you factor in career length, I’d argue for gymnastics.
Even the best of the best only last a few years. It’s not just hard to become elite, it’s hard to stay elite.
Compared to something like baseball where I think if you could dig up and reanimate Babe Ruth he could probably still hit (though if he left some pieces behind on the run to first, would he still be safe?)
It is fairly common for slashes to break wrists, as well as knees, ribs, faces. Injuries in hockey are quite common, as common as football.
This is VERY common. Highsticking, basically when you hit someone above the shoulders with your stick, is often not called, if it is quite often only 2 mins, 4 if the person is cut. The cut player almost never is out for more then a shift, and yapping all the time (just watch Darcy Tucker of the Leafs). As well, it isn’t mandatory to wear a face mask in hockey, and all of the players don’t even do up their chinstraps. Helmets are more for show in a lot of cases then protection. I still think Hockey and Football are about even when it comes to amount of physical punishment, and I watch (use to play) both.
In any team sport the statistics always add up to .500. One player’s failure is another’s success; every win is a loss, every homer a homer allowed, every run scored a run allowed. I can’t think of any way to determine if hitting is easier than pitching, because they always balance out. Variances in the relative strnegth of the two can almost always be ascribed to external factors. I would observe, though, two interesting things:
It is obviously much easier for a pitcher to continue being effective far past prime athletic years than it is for a hitter; many pitchers have been effective past the age of 40, and sometimes All-Stars, whereas few batters have been effective past 40 and very, very few have been All-Stars. There’s some exceptions (Barry Bonds, Dave Winfield) but my impression is they’re outnumbered by pitchers. But maybe that doesn’t mean anything.
If it were true that pitching was harder to master than hitting we would expect to see hitting become more and more dominant as you go down in level; AAA would see hitters with a slight advantage, AA more so, A even more, college ball still more, and in Little League the hitters would utterly rule the roost. But that is most definitely not the case; the game is remarkably well balanced. Occasionally absurd scores at lower levels are generally attributable to inept fielding and wider gaps in skill between teams.
I WILL say that this “hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports” thing is pure baloney and means nothing at all. Hitting a baseball is harder than executive a quadruple jump while ice skating? Yeah, right. I can hit a baseball.
Furthermore, the rate at which hitters are successful (about 26 percent of the time) is meaningless. The game is structured to generate that success rate so that you don’t score 40 runs a game. It has nothing to do with any intrinsic super-difficulty in hitting a baseball. You could jack batting averages up to .350 just by moving first base ten feet closer to the plate; it wouldn’t make hitting a baseball any easier but batting averages would soar.
I think most hitters will have a longer career played at a high level than a pitcher because hitters don’t abuse their bodies the same way pitchers do. There is really no way to pitch in baseball that won’t get you hurt. The best you can do is hope that you don’t injure yourself too much.
That said, a pitcher can last for a long time because he either is a reliever and only pitching briefly 3-5 times a week or a starter and pitching every 5 days.
I’m going to need a cite to believe you. My Giants put 18 guys on IR last year…over a third of the entire roster! Has that ever happened to any NHL team? (7 guys out for the season.)
Pick at random any of the NFL injury reports for 2004 for a plethora of examples. You’ll need a compelling cite to convince me that NHL teams have to deal with this level of injuries.
Terrel Owens, Ty Law, Michael Strahan, Steve Smith, Chad Pennington, Todd Heap, Charles Rogers, Jeremy Shockey, Julius Jones, John (the pussy) Abraham, Steve McNair, Rich Gannon, Kellen Winslow…the list goes on and on and on.
Well, in fairness, the actual saw is “hitting a major league fastball is the hardest thing to do in sports.”
Then again, that seems to imply simply making contact. While it does look difficult, I agree that it’s not the hardest thing in the world to do. Your skating example sounds tougher.
Playing NFL quarterback is easily the hardest “thing” to do in sports.
As to which sport is hardest to excel in, I would think that the very nature of excellence would make it pretty much equally difficult to do in any of them. Elite just means better than everyone else, so your standards for excellence are going to come directly from the skill level of everybody in the world who participates in the sport. If there was a sport in which it was easy to be superlative, the entire logical structure of the universe would come crashing down and I would be dunking on Pao Gasol from halfcourt.
Yeah but can you hit a baseball thrown by Roger Clemens? I have no idea what you do in real life but unless you are a pro baseball player I doubt you’d hit many more balls than could be allowed for by dumb luck (forget for a moment whether the ball is caught…just hit a fair ball at all).
No doubt a quadruple jump in ice skating is horrendously difficult but I would wager if you devoted several years of training 8 hours a day, seven days a week to it you could be taught to do it. Now, if you trained the same amount to hit a baseball against a major league pitcher doubtless you would improve your average but do you ever think you’d manage to hit enough to merit a spot on a major league team? Probably not. Simply look at the roster of all pro-baseball players. All of them have been playing baseball and training at it the better part of their lives and very, very few rise to the rank of elite hitters.
A lot of the discussion here has been on how difficult it is to get into a sport (e.g. you need access to a $50 million boat or something) but IMO this misses the point. The point is, given the opportunity, what would be the most difficult sport to really excel in?
Some sports such as running I think you need to take out of the running (pun intended) from the get-go. Everyone can run (barring disability). Not everyone can be the fastest but that has as much to do with a person’s physiology as it does training. I could train forever and never, ever be close to the fastest runner because my body simply is not configured (or built) as well as a true world class runner’s body is. Things that simply are not changeable even by training such as leg length. By this token you may as well say a defensive lineman in US football is the most difficult because unless you weigh in near 300 pounds you are pretty much out of the picture before you even started.
For an answer to the OP I think you need to choose sports where anyone, theoretically and regardless of body type, has a chance to compete. Granted to an extent you cannot disregard body type completely but in some sports you may still excel even if your body is not a classic example of a player in that sport. For instance look at Spud Webb who at 5’7" tall had a 12 year career in the NBA.
Given the above I still think hitting a baseball against a major league pitcher has to be near the top of the list. Hitting it consistently anyway.
The first entry states that the LA Kings lost over 630 games to injury. It doesn’t say how many players were put on the disabled list though. However it does say that 42 Kings needed to be dressed to play a game, almost double the roster that teams are allowed to carry (In the NHL the teams have a roster of 23).
This has the off season injury report from 2003 for all teams. The Minnesota Wild 6 players who all need surgery, a rate of 25%.
This is a list of well know hockey players who were all hurt at about the same time, and is as compelling a list as your list of well known football players.
This is a list of teams who advanced to the Conference finals in 2001, and who they had on their injured list at that time. The Leafs have 6 players who are out for the rest of the year.
I don’t know how convincing all of these are. The rate of injury seems to be slightly more in the NFL, I wouldn’t say significantly though. As well NFL Rosters are built to withstand injuries, carrying 3 QBs, 4-5 RBs, 7-8 OL, while NHL rosters do not. I stand by my statement that the violence in the 2 sports is similar.
Question along these lines from someone who knows nothing about baseball: Haven’t TPTB in baseball tinkered with the rules over the years to change the balance between pitching and hitting? (e.g., the introduction of the pitcher’s mound) Any thoughts on which role would be dominant if these factors were changed? (Obviously, I’m not referring to any arbitrary changes that the Teeming Millions could think up–but, for example, if the rules were more like they were when baseball was first organized.)
I can’t tell you how many times I see people in football running full speed one way, not seeing the guy running full speed at them from the other direction and just getting absolutely clocked. Body goes flying backward, etc.
Or the kick/punt returner getting nailed by a 200 lb person at full speed the second they touch the ball (and sometimes when they don’t touch it at all).
When I watch Hockey, I just don’t see that same level of contact. I see people getting checked pretty good, or getting hit pretty hard into the wall, and certainly there are a lot of fights, but I just don’t see the high-momentum-2-bodies-collide-and-at-least-one-goes-flying type of hit.
Some stats that might be interesting to compare:
Number of people paralyzed each year
Number of concusions
Number of broken bones
The “Big Hit” which is what you are talking about you does happen with frequency in hockey. Addmitedly not necessarily the same frequency of football, but still pretty damn frequent. Wacth Don Cherry’s Rock 'Em Sock 'Em hockey, you will see plenty of big hits. I will agree that the amount of body to body contact is greater in Football, however the fact that Hockey gives you a weapon makes up for that, and the total amount of violence is a wash.
I still say the hardest sport to be an elite athlete is Elephant Polo.