Lacrosse. You have to be in as good a shape as any sport, and you have a hard rubber ball travelling over 100MPH, in addition to opponents beating on you with sticks. Plus scoring takes a lot of tactical manuvering by the entire attack unit and midfield, unless it’s a broken defensive play.
Rugby, or hockey.
Rugby is like American football without pads…
And hockey, not only do you never stop moving, but you have to watch out for checks. It’s a rough game. I’ve even heard of guys sweating off 15 lbs. in a single game.
Yeesh.
You do realize that hockey players often play with broken bones, don’t you? When the Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup in 1999, Mike Modano was playing with a broken wrist that also had major tendon damage. There were six other players who were playing with ACL damage that required surgery. Ask anyone who knows hockey about Bobby Baun.
I have seen rodeo cowboys get up after having a horse or bull step on them. Tough SOB’s.
Well, as always no one uses the same definition for tough, mentally or physically.
As far as conditioning and endurance there is no topping IronMan Triathletes. They have a very strong will in order to drive themselves to train and then race in a solo sport, good at self motivation. Will and determination don’t really describe a mentally tough sport to me, they are factors, but I want a sport that requires more thought and analysis under physical duress. Also endurance is only about half the battle phyisically, you won’t see very many Triathletes overpowering a guy like me, and I’m by no means in great shape or of freakish size.
The point is that the best athlete isn’t always the strongest, or the fastest, or having the greatest endurance, its the greatest combination of all of the above. This is why those “Battle of the All Stars” challenges are fairly compelling. They bring together great athletes from all disciplines and make them do contests that range from raw speed, endurance, brute force, throwing ability, and a variety of other aspects. From what I’ve seen, that vast majority of winners are American Football players.
I will however say that this is restricted to the so called skill positions, and not lineman. The lineman are great athletes with quickness and incredible power, but they aren’t well rounded and can’t endure compared to most other sports.
My strongest support of Football players is that no sport takes the amount of constant concentration, strategy and analysis under exhaustion, pain and opponents pressure that it does. In football skill positions are going at 100% speed and acceleration during every play. Granted they get time off in between, but you see very few other athletes who can and do the equivalent of running 60 40yrd dashes in a row. This takes exceptional conditioning, its a different conditioning than a marathoner, but its still very taxing. These players must have playbooks bigger than the Chicago phonebook memorized (name another sport that has anything like this) and be able to recall them instantly and accept changes to these plays based on coaches instruction. These are not dumb people. In a second they have to try and read what the opposing team is trying to do on the field based on a weeks training of a equally thick playbook. Couple the need for thinking and decision making with the fact that these are by far some of the strongest and fastest professional athletes out there, I think I have a very strong case.
Basketball players are very good athletes, graceful, quick, and have some of the best body control next to gymnasts. However basketball is not a mentally challenging sport on any level, they don’t have to call on that complete exhaustion that a triathlete does, nor do they have to know a vast variety of plays and combinations. Scouting and preperation is minimal compared to baseball and football.
And while they do run alot, its usually at a fairly moderate jog, only very rarely at a sprint. Basketball players, between TV timeouts and foul shots, get nearly as many breaks as football players. Michael Jordan is the greatest athlete of all time in my opinion, but I don;t think thats because he played in the most mentally or physically challenging sport.
Triathletes and Marathoners simply don’t have to think at all during their events, yes there is a certain amount of strategy regarding when to go hard and when to follow, and so on, but I think this is greatly over played. Yes its there, but I don;t think its all that demanding.
Decathletes fall into the same problem, they are more well rounded than runners and swimmers, but they also have very little in mental requirements.
Baseball players just aren’t either. I love the game, and the mental aspects of it are greatly underrated. Scouting and preparation are very important and challenging, hitting a baseball, while not really the cliche of “the hardest thing to do in sports” statistically, is still damn hard. As a matter of fact, there are far more truly great baseball players lacking physically than vice versa. Tony Gwynn is a long was from a physical specimen, but he has the mental part of the game so completely mastered he’ll get into the hall of fame. That said, if you can excel at the sport and be John Kruk…
Rugby is a long ways from Football with out pads, yes they are tough, and yes its a great sport. But Rugby is basically football with all the structure and full speed collisions removed. Much lower on the mental standard. And the lack of a forward pass really cuts the likelyhood of a nasty hit down.
Skating just isn’t as taxing as running, I’ll take Lacrosse over Hockey. And both sports suffer from many of the same problems as basketball. These are fluid games, much less thought and planning and much more reaction.
Soccer…please, less not even soil the debate with that.
I’d have to say gymnastics is the toughest sport. I may be a little biased cause I’m involved in the sport, but hey, it’s tough! Many people can’t even do a cartwheel and gymnasts do all kinds of other crazy things, like a standing full-twist on the beam. :eek:
Plus, at the higher levels gymnasts train as much as 40 hours a week (or more!) for almost the entire year.
Also, this game called jai-alai, I hear its pretty rough. I don’t know how to explain it but there is this curved bat thingy and a super hard ball. The players try to catch the ball in the curved bat thingy and they whip the ball at each other. According to my high school spanish teacher, the players in that game get some BAD injuries.
If someone can explain the game better, please do!
As stated before what is a sport and what do you mean by toughest?
How about hiking the Appalation Trail (2000+mi).
free diving (where you use a weighted sled and no air)
rowing across the Atlantic
subway surfing
poaching white rhino tusks in a protected preserve
Football? Bah!
Hockey: It’s the fastest game on earth and you can’t run out of bounds. Try blocking a slapshot moving at 90mph. Get up after a two hundred pound defenseman tries to make you one with the boards. If you want to be a professional goalie you better be able to stop better than 90% of the shots that come your way.
Ice is hard and unforgiving when you land on it, I still have no feeling in my right knee from an injury in January but I will be lacing them up next winter.
But…
Lacrosse is an amazing game requiring speed, skill, coordination, and incredible mental and physical toughness. In ancient times it could be played on a field a mile long with up to a thousand participants. A game could go on all day. Players could be and were killed in the process.
Ah, but the claim made here isn’t that getting a hit is the most difficult thing in sports, the claim often made is that hitting a major league pitch is the most difficult act in sports. This is not true for reasons listed above. Clearly, getting a hit is a very difficult task, and no one has disputed that. But there are more difficult tasks.
Even I, given my somewhat limited athletic ability, would be able, given enough opportunities, to get a hit off of a major league pitcher. The possiblity may be 1 in 1000, but it isn’t zero.
The possibility of my successfully performing a triple axel, or an iron cross, or a blind tumbling pass on a balance beam, completing a full triathlon, swimming the English channel, or free-climbing El Capitan is precisely zero. Notice that I list both skill-based and endurance- based abilities.
My point is that there are many things more difficult than hitting a baseball, or, if you prefer, getting a hit. Look at my list again. I would maintain that the set of people posessing the ability to do any of the things on that list is much smaller than the set of people able to hit a baseball.
Buzkashi is the Afghan sport described by Spavined Gelding. I agree with him that this game is tougher than anything else currently played anywhere in the world.
If you insist on a Eurocentric bias, however, consider the Irish game of hurly, something like lacrosse but reportedly rougher.
The ball game of ancient Mexico, where if anyone actually succeeded in putting the ball through the ring, the game was over and the entire losing team was subject to human sacrifice, would trump all the others if it were still played.
No, they do mean getting a hit. If you make an out, it doesn’t matter if you made contact or not.
Is there any serious competition to buzkashi? Consider: how many hundreds of pounds does a dead calf weigh? Now imagine having to lean down from a moving horse’s saddle to pick it up off the ground. All the while you’re surrounded by mean guys attempting to give you body checks with their horses, not to speak of pounding the crap out of you.
How anyone could lean out of a horse’s saddle and reach down to the ground to pick up anything, let along a dead weight of some hundreds of pounds, is daunting beyond belief. And you talk of baseball?
In each case quoted above, the claim is about hitting the ball, not getting a hit. The way I’ve always heard the claim is something similar to “Hitting a major league (pitch, usually identified as a slider or fastball) is the hardest thing in sports.” This is clearly different from getting a hit. The speaker may mean getting a hit, but that is not what is being said.
In any case, let’s examine the claim in terms of getting a hit. The average major leaguer gets a hit about one out of four times at bat. By this standard, getting a hit is an extremely difficult thing to do. No disputes that it takes a very high degree of skill to do this, and that this skill is posessed by a relatively small number of people. But the number of people who can and do get a hit in major league baseball is also much higher than the number of people who can swim the English Channel, complete a triple axel, or do a blind backflip onto a balance beam.
The primary reason getting a hit is so difficult is that the pitcher has eight other defenders helping him out. It is assumed that in the pitcher vs. batter confrontation, the batter is going to win most of the time, so the pitcher is given extra help. Succeeding one out of four times when facing nine defenders seems to me to be doing pretty well.
And it makes a big difference whether you make contact. A player who strikes out cannot advance a runner and has no chance of reaching on an error. Contact hitters who foul off a lot of pitchers are much more likely to be walked.
Chess. 
varsity rowing (yes, in the boats with the oars)has to be a contender.
our season lasts septmber to july in ireland.
training consists of:
1 hour endurance weights 4 times a week
8 hours on the water (8 am-4pm) saturday and sunday.
2 hours on the water midweek (6:30-8:30am) this increases to rowing every evening when it is light enough to do so.
2km ergometer test twice a week
2 hour body circuits twice a week
2 hour run once a week
free weights and strength weights 3 times a week.
this most of the boys cycle and/or run to and from college and training every day.
as well as this they have to go to lectures and pass the end of year exams.
i’m a cox, so i get to skip most of this and just sit in a boat all weekend, some mornings and every night from 6-9pm in the summer, admiring the muscular men in lycra in front of me!
I’d just like to clarify or respond to the subject of “hitting” a baseball. When I posted “hitting a major league pitch is the hardest single feat in sports”, I didn’t mean just fouling it off, I meant making solid enough contact to have a legit chance of getting a hit. It probably wasn’t clear to people who don’t talk baseball or follow baseball closely, so my bad. I also think that is what the author of the article I posted the link to meant as well, and I think that was again pretty clear to people who know a little baseball jargon, but may not so clear to people who don’t. That being said, I stand my my comment that hitting a major league pitch is the hardest single feat in sports.
It’s hard to top Buzkashi, but I’ve gotta bring up “human” races- discussed by Cecil here: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_113b.html . 48-hour races? SIX DAY races? I’m sure it doesn’t compare with dragging dead calves around, but it seems pretty hardcore, nonetheless.
M.
I know baseball lingo just fine, and hitting the ball is clearly different from getting a hit. If you meant making solid contact, that is what you should have said the first time. I responded to what you said. But if what you mean is that making solid contact is the most difficult thing in sports, I have to disagree with you. Most major leaguers make solid enough contact to put the ball in play in more than half of their at bats. This is why there are nine defenders facing the one batter.
Every major leaguer can get solid contact. Most figure skaters never even attempt a triple axel in competition. Most gymnasts never do a blind backlip onto a balance beam. The number of people who can free climb el Capitan is probably in single digits. The number of people who can swim the English Channel isn’t much higher. The number of people who can, and regularly do, make good contact with major league pitching is in the thousands. It’s not even close.
Grounding out weakly to the second baseman would not be considered ‘solid’ contact by most baseball people(including fans). Nor would come-backers, dribblers, pop-ups, lazy fly balls or foul-outs be considered examples of making solid contact. These are all examples of the pitcher getting the best of the hitter.
Sometimes ‘outs’ can be considered solid contact. This would mean hitting the ball hard directly at a fielder or being ‘robbed’ when a fielder makes an exceptional play.
While I wouldn’t consider soccer to be the toughest sport, your comment seems to be based more on bias than reason. You argue for football based on (1) the amount of running, (2) and the thinking and memorization required.
If running 60 40-yd dashes helps make a sport tough, then surely the 7+ miles per game a midfielder runs qualifies as well. As for decision making, soccer (and almost any other sport) requires as much, if not more decision-making on the fly. No constant timeouts to have somebody to tell every player what to do. That leaves the fact that football players take hits. On this one, I don’t think they’re even close to hockey. Football players play 16 regular season games. Hockey players have 82 and several are played in the same week. They take hits as well as slashes from heavy wood. It’s much tougher.
I’d have to say there are two answers for very different
reasons. Professional Cycling and Golf. Ah, the obsurdity of my answer and the extreme difference of these sports.
I think sports have two tests to measure. Cardiovascular fitness and eye-hand coordination
I find it hard to name any other sport that requires a participant to be more fit from a cardiovascular standpoint than a rider on the Tour de France. Yes, the ironman demands more from that point, but it is only for one day. Riders on the Tour de France must ride 28 stages in about 31 days. Their total fitness level has got be better than in any other sport. I once heard that recent 5 time winner Miguel Indurain had a resting heart beat of 25-30 beats per minute. I think that is extraordinary.
As for eye-hand coordination, my vote goes to Golf. Everyone can play the game and even rank amateurs can get a hole in one. But to play at a level of the tour professionals in Europe or the US and be sucessful over time is extremely hard.
In both cases, those who climb to the top of these sports and are able to remain at or near the top for some extended amount of time have mastered the true tests of sport, IMHO.