I’ve heard that injuries were a big reason why he couldn’t move forward. Probably a bigger reason is he was never a starter and played behind Warren Sapp. If he was a big fish in a smaller pond maybe things would have worked out different.
Granted. But, Vinnie Jones interpretation of the rules nonwithstanding, football is a contact sport. Just not that kind of contact…
From Hugh Laurie’s Wikipedia page:
In 1977, he was a member of the junior coxed pair that won the British national title before representing Britain’s Youth Team at the 1977 Junior World Rowing Championships. In 1980, Laurie and his rowing partner, J.S. Palmer, were runners-up in the Silver Goblets[20] coxless pairs for Eton Vikings rowing club. He also achieved a Blue while taking part in the 1980 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.[21] Cambridge lost that year by five feet.[22] During this time, Laurie was training for up to eight hours a day and was on course to become an Olympic-standard rower.[23] He is a member of the Leander Club, one of the oldest rowing clubs in the world, and was a member of the Hermes Club and Hawks’ Club.
Kurt Russell got as high as the Double A (second-best Minor League Baseball) level before a torn rotator cuff led to his retirement from the game and a return to the acting career in which he had already gained some fame.
You may not know Johnny Berardino, but he was a household name in my family for both his Major League Baseball career (which included being an infielder for the World Series champion 1948 Cleveland Indians) and his role on General Hospital, my grandma’s favorite soap opera.
I like the a tors who started as actors then went on to show amazing prowess at something else.
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Paul Newman first raced a car for Winning, a race movie from 1969. He took to racing so well that he became a world class driver. In '79 he came in second in the 24 hours of Le Mans. At 70 he became the oldest driver in history to be part of the winning team at Daytona.
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Newman also learned to play pool for The Hustler, and got so good at it that Jackie Gleason, humself an ex professional pool player, said that Newman cokld have gone pro.
Stephen Amell (from ‘Arrow’) started professional wrestling in 2015. It may not be a real sport, but requires a lot of athleticism.
He also competed on ‘American Ninja Warrior’ and absolutely destroyed the course.
Y’know, that puts me in mind — only in reverse — of how legendary song-and-dance man Jimmy Cagney apparently got his big break in the movies (a) after some time as an amateur boxer, but (b) before he worked his ass off to become a bona fide judo black belt.
He also had an uncredited role in North By Northwest, as the cop who guides a drunk Cary Grant to the phone for his one call and dials it for him.
IIRC he was also uncredited in The Winning Team (starring Ronald Reagan and Doris Day) as the guy who calls the bullpen for Grover Cleveland Alexander to come in to pitch in the seventh game of the 1926 World Series.
You are just doing a No True Scotsman. You are redefining the word “skill” so it suits the proposition for which you contend. Look at a definition of “skill”. It is far broader than what you are allowing.
Comedian Joe E. Brown probably had the best reputation as an all-round athlete among Hollywood actors.
John Saxon was in over 200 projects over a 60 year period, from child star to being in seemingly every failed Roddenberry pilot. He was also a black belt in Judo and Shotokan karate.
Two World War Two heroes who participated in D-Day were also fairly proficient prize fighters. Jack Warden was a welterweight who had thirteen professional bouts under the name Johnny Costello before staring in many movies and TV shows after being a stage actor for five years
Charles Durning was also a boxer and fought on a card with Warden (Johnny Costello) before either of them became well known actors. The two actors have always reminded me of each other and their war records do indicate they were cut from similar cloth.
In addition, Dino Crocetti – a rather well known singer, actor, and sometime funnyman was also a boxer. Perhaps best known as a member of the Rat Pack, he was an amateur welterweight with a record of 25-11 (according to one source). He later went pro and often joked that of his thirteen professional fights he won all but a dozen of them. (Others claim his record was more like 11-1-1 or 11-2.) When he first moved to New York City to become an entertainer, he would occasionally have to sell tickets to fight his roommate Sonny King in bare knuckle matches until a knockout right in their apartment when money was tight for both of them. That singer and actor is better known as Dean Martin and it seems his whole real life was intensive preparation for his role as Matt Helm.
None of these guys is even in the running for best athlete to become well known as an entertainer, but it was pretty eye opening to me to know how hard some of these guys had to work to make it as entertainers. Lou Costello had to pay for Martin to have a nose job before he was taken seriously as a leading man apparently because his nose was huge and said: EVERLAST on it in reverse so you could only read it in a mirror.
(That is a joke, not a factual claim but his nose was larger and it did take a turn before the surgery.)
That kills me - he’s easily the worst thing in Enter The Dragon.
I watched the video – after hitting the buzzer he did the Salmon Ladder, but then thanked the audience and dropped on the swinging peg board. Had he tried I think he could have done that as well.
Brian
I’m not “redefining” it, just using it in context. The word skill can be used very broadly, as you say. But you might say about a successful executive that “he owes his ascent to brown-nosing rather than skill” even though brown-nosing is itself a skill that the guy is talented at.
In this thread, we’re talking about athletic skill. While being a champion weightlifter requires enormous strength, which is itself an atheltic skill, as well as assorted weightlifting technique skills which might possibly be considered athletic, being a champion bodybuilder requires none of that. It requires putting in an enormous amount of work, a successful body-building strategy, plus having the type of body which responds to weightlifting. None of these are athletic skills.
I was good friends with a professional bodybuilder. He also went to my gym for awhile. I was single so I was trying to get in shape. I was in the gym 1 1/2 to 2 hours a day. He would stroll in and do 30 minutes and walk out. He lifted heavier weights than normal people but not impressive next to your average power lifter. But he has great genetics. He also took steroids by the bushel (as well as other things that weren’t illegal because the government doesn’t know humans are taking it). By far the hardest part of his lifestyle was his diet. That was a full time job. He was either eating massive amounts of calories constantly during his build up phase or doing extreme weight cutting when approaching competition season. Nothing he did to win several big championships and get into magazines was particularly athletic. No more athletic than anyone else in the gym.
The original comment to which I was replying was very broadly stated and was not qualified by reference to the OP in any way. I accept that if you read into that comment the word “athletic” where it pointedly doesn’t appear, you are correct.
How about Audie Murphy? He wasn’t a professional athlete, but the guy was one tough SOB. From Wiki:
He received every military combat award for valor available from the U.S. Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism. Murphy received the Medal of Honor for valor that he demonstrated at the age of 19 for single-handedly holding off a company of German soldiers for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, then leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.
After the war, he was a successful movie and TV actor, and even tried his hand at songwriting. Sadly, he died in a plane crash at age 45.
He definitely wasn’t athletic. He was not allowed in the Marine Corps or the Army paratroopers because he was too short and underweight. That was mostly due to malnourishment from extreme poverty growing up. He almost washed out of the regular infantry for the same reason. His toughness and bravery are beyond question.
That would be the Calgary Stampeders. In case anybody needs it for trivia night.