Well, five out of the six probably. One of those guys is a two-time Masters player as an amateur. I would guess he’s decided not to go pro.
Regular people.
Not super amazingly talented amateurs that have not yet gone pro.
I mean, Roger Federer was probably able to beat all of us at tennis 1 month before he went pro, even though he was not yet the best player in the world(yes, Nadal too).
Regular people. Dedicated, but not totally 100% life-revolving around that sport, people. Semi-regular players. Not…super serious players.
I didn’t see that. Happen to have a link?
The thing about golf is that any halfway decent golfer can play as well as a pro - for a shot, or a hole. Hell, I suck at golf but I have a hole-in-one - no golfer in the world could have done better than me for those 10 seconds. Being a professional golfer is more about consistency than about being able to physically do something that the average guy can’t do. I actually know several guys who can drive it 300 yards, but they’ll never make the tour. But while I can hole out from 175 yards…
I cannot hit a homerun in a major league ballpark.
I cannot dunk.
I cannot bicycle 100 miles in 3 hours.
I cannot run a sub-4-minute mile.
I sure as hell couldn’t finish the Ironman.
Most pro athletes do something that us mere mortals can’t. Pro-golfers don’t really do more than your average weekend 5-10 handicap can do; they just do it with fabulous and uncanny consistency, cause they almost never make our mistakes.
Basketball may have the only component of a major sport where a 12 year old girl in a wheelchair could dominate a 7’1 300lb black man (free throw shooting).
Question for golfers and tennis players: what separates recreational/scholastic players from pro players? Whenever I watch these sports I’m wondering what separates the levels of proficiency, and indeed 1 pro from another.
I disagree. Juan Pablo Montoya was a first class open wheel driver: he won the Indy 500 in dominating fashion and gave Michael Schumacher stiff competition in F1. But as a NASCAR driver, he hasn’t won an oval race in 4+ years (he has won two road course events). AJ Allmendinger was pretty good in CART and Sam Hornish won three IRL titles. Yet neither has won a race and Hornish has lost his ride. I’m sure if a top NASCAR driver went to F1, he would struggle horribly. You have to train at it for years.
My first thought. I’m regular person who cycles 5000-6000 km a year. But the Tour guys can be at the back end of 3500 km in three weeks, in the last km of a 200km stage/10km climb, and would still blow past me as if I wasn’t moving. Mind boggling.
Don’t forget we’re not talking about becoming the world’s best here; just competing versus an (average) professional.
Again I think it comes down to an interpretation of the OP. If you were to put me in a NASCAR today I’m sure I’d be spinning the car out in circles any time I went over 40mph.
OTOH it’s a sport where few people get to have the training or practice with a car that powerful in that environment. I reckon with training a large subset of the population could become competent NASCAR drivers at professional level.
I think a gifted amateur would barely last a lap. The forces and demands of F1 are so far beyond our normal comprehension as to belong to another world.
Consistent 5g’s through corners. Decelerating from 200mph in 100 yards to take a hairpin. And this is even before the rain starts to fall.
The racer mentality is the same from code to code I’m sure, but the technical transition upwards from Indy, or Nascar is harder than the other direction. Few manage it successfully.
A big factor in success may be the ability to commit the minimal brain power to monitoring and adjusting the car systems (brake balance, mix, wing, DRS, KERS etc. etc.) and leave sufficient mental bandwith to concentrate on tactics and strategy. Not many can do that and it is what separates the mortals from the likes of Clark, Schumacher, Prost, Senna, Alonso, Hamilton, Vettel et al.
Football (oh, OK…soccer if you must) may well be a good example of amateurs being able to compete with the pros.
The English FA cup is a straight knock-out competition that often sees the very best teams in world up against “gifted amateurs”.
Sure enough, every now and again we see acts of giant-killing. Of course in a league situation those amateurs would come bottom of the pile but rarely are they annihilated in a one-off game.
It is this possibility of upset that makes soccer what it is.
I believe there was a survey done to establish which sport provided the most excitement due this possibility of upset and soccer was top I think.
Some of this may be due to the fact that, in the UK at least, there are so many levels of professional soccer that the actual differences in ability are not so great.
The amateurs may be six league levels below the premiership but they may be playing with ex-pros and indeed some of those amateurs will raise to be pros. So though on paper the gap is huge, In practice it is much smaller.
I think in a lot of other sports this doesn’t happen so much. There is less mobility and dispersal thought the leagues pyramid (even if such league pyramids exist)
I doubt most could make a single turn at speed in a racecar. That includes F1, NASCAR, Indycar, etc. A 300 horsepower car on cold tires is chore to get moving in a straight line. It’s like driving in the rain, but most racecars have more like 900 horsepower. They go into turns with cold tires with 20 to 40 other competitors who are also on cold tires. There’s no way an amateur racer who normally normally races Miatas at auto crosses could just jump in and do that without causing a huge mess. You can work your way up eventually, but it takes a lot of time and money and you will still most likely get chewed up and spit out.
Drag racing is similar. Most people can’t slip a clutch right in the first 60 feet at a drag strip. Top fuel and funny car racers slip the clutch for the entire distance of the track.
I’d be willing to argue that most team sports could carry an amateur for at least part of a game. Individual sports are where the gap gets huge. Sure, any pro quarterback would make any amateur look terrible, as would any other direct comparison, but a team might be able to carry one amateur.
I still say cycling. In the Tour de France, half of the pros that start it can’t even finish it. In a flat stage, it’s not too terribly hard to keep up with the group, but a mountain stage makes me want to throw up just thinking about it.
Baseball for the smallest gap.
That’s the difference between a AAA player and someone in the big leagues. It’s not between a regular schlub and an MLB player. We’d never get the ball out of the infield, assuming we could get our bats on the ball.
ok so I had boxing for biggest gap, I’m gonna say maybe chess for smallest gap?
A good club player would have an ELO of around 1900. Such a player could certainly eke out an occasional draw or even win against a FIDE master.
If we’re going to draw the professional line at grandmaster, that changes matters, but with preparation against a specific GM they might be able to steer the game to a position where the GM would accept a draw.
Cold tires? Don’t they heat the tires in the pit / do a parade lap / a rolling start in most race sports?
I should add that I’m not saying that there’s little difference between an amateur and a pro. It’s just the nature of chess that individual games might go against the better player.
This is another reason why the OP is one you can play about with: sports where games are typically played in series are bound to allow for an amateur to beat a pro in one game.
And yes, chess is a sport. 
They heat up after a couple of laps, but a brand new set of tires is pretty dicey to drive on at first. I’m not sure about F1, but I know tire warmers are illegal in NASCAR. Each time they get a new set of tires, they’re careful for a lap or 2 until they can get some heat into them.
From personal experience, I’ve got drag radials on my Mustang and they are very slippery at WOT unless I do a burnout to heat them up.
Maybe?
Oh dear oh dear.
This link shows Top Gears Richard Hammond attempting to drive the Renault R25. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUZJVY-sHo&feature=related. Richard Hammond once tried to break the world speed record, he does have some ability.
He could barely keep the thing moving.
The answer to “smallest gap” between pros and regular people could very well be cricket–but only for a very small subset of bowlers. It’s the only sport I know where a “regular person” somehow rose to professional level very quickly.
Jack Iverson played cricket in school in Australia, and not very well either, then gave up the game for 12 years. He started playing again while in service in WWII with his army buddies, and chanced upon an interesting form of spin bowling.
Six years later he was playing for the Australian national team. He still ranks third all-time in Test bowling average among all Australians.
The difference between the pros in batting and fast bowling is vast, though. I think I’m still shaking from facing 90 mph bowling from a machine. Even getting a single solid shot felt like an enormous victory.
Also, auto racing is the only professional sport I can think of that allows women to compete with men.