America! Fuck yeah!!!
who?
who?
who?
pro-rata you don’t
no you don’t, Spain are world and European champions
that’s the one with the fat men and wimpy gloves isn’t it?,
that’s the one with the freaks?
no you don’t, I can even recall the USA playing in the olympic hockey tournament
I’m not familiar with the sport of which you speak
except GB are by far the best
WAS…correct
errrr…this is 2011
So you are saying your Olympic success is because all the other countries are using their best athletes in the World Cup, thus leaving the dregs to stumble along to the Olympics in order to be thrashed by the USA Ubermensch …I see, interesting.
A highly developed doping policy and institutionalised cheating.
Bribery…Money! pure and simple.
It is true to say that 100% of world championships that take place on American Soil are located in the USA. I cannot argue with that and I can’t really explain why.
Nevermind. No pitchers are in the top 10. #11 is a tie between Abreu (Venezuelan) and Helton (USA). Helton has a slight edge this year, so let’s give him the nod. 
It’s more that their hand-eye coordination is a big mystery. Hard to call them first-rate when they don’t really need fingers to play the sport.
It’s nice to see this sort of reply from someone on the opposite side of the OP’s argument.
Ever thought of changing your username to “unwhooshed brain”?
So your post was ironic and/or sarcastic? Really :dubious:? Consider me wooshed, then :rolleyes:.
A far better question is: Why do the Australians dominate the sporting world?
A country of only 20 million people, roughly the size of Texas or New York, less than half the size of England, half the size of France, etc. . and they are among the best in the world at:
Cricket
Rugby
Athletics
Swimming
Golf
Tennis
And all this despite the fact that the most popular sport by far is Australian Rules Football, which no other country plays.
oh don’t be so sensitive.
You may have missed out on the OP’s previous multiple threads on the same sort of subject and so may not recognise the various tongue-in-cheek references in my post.
Go read them, they are fun for a short while.
Yeah, that was my reaction too. Crouch? Really? I mean, he’s a decent player, an extremely tall man and a snappy dancer but not the first name that leaps to mind.
Two serious nitpicks:
(1) Australian rules is actually only popular in half of Australia (Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia)
(2) Arguably the most popular team sport in Australia is netball – a sport played only by girls and women. However, that is most popular in terms of player participation, not in terms of size of audience.
Such a minor detail did not prevent the OP from proclaiming American sporting hegemony.
Interesting theory. Of the four big “team sports” in the US (football, baseball, basketball, hockey)…
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A fair percentage of MLB players (probably not a majority, but I don’t have numbers in front of me) are from Latin America, as well as probably a couple dozen from Asia, and a handful from Australia and other countries
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The NBA also now has a fair number of foreign-born players, including a few stars (Nowitzki, Ming when he was healthy, among others), though most of the stars are American-born
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The NHL was originally dominated by Canadians (the N in NHL stands for “National”, and that actually refers to Canada); today, there are quite a lot of players from Europe in the league (primarily Scandinavia and Eastern Europe)
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The NFL still has very few players not born in the U.S.; this is undoubtedly a function of very limited play of the game in other countries. A generation ago, about the only foreign-born players were placekickers (converted soccer players).
All four pro leagues now do some level of marketing of their games outside of the U.S. (playing games abroad, TV coverage, etc.), though I think that their primary focus is still inward, to North America.
I am compelled to note that baseball is played in a bunch of countries, and a few of them are per capita better at it than the United States. Strictly by ratio of MLB players to population, the ranking is something like,
Curaçao
Dominican Republic
Puerto Rico
Venezuela
United States
Panama
Cuba
Canada
Nicaragua
Australia
Taiwan
Japan
Mexico
Colombia
South Korea
Note that several of these countries, especially Japan and Cuba, could be ranked higher against the United States if a blended metric was used giving some credit for their highly-developed domestic leagues and performance in international tournaments.
The OP basically seems to be arguing that the sports world consists of American sports and that Americans dominate it.
Look at an international sport like tennis. You have Americans in the top levels but alongside a majority of non-Americans.
If we cared about any of those sports we’d dominate. Its simple really, if America cares about a sport, we dominate that sport. Soccer and rugby and cricket don’t have the money and glamour and respect that major league sports like the NFL, MLB or NBA have hence our best athletes don’t go into these sports.
Why become a rugby player or soccer player making small money in some non-american country where they still don’t have the same sport entertainment production values, playing in small stadiums when you can make millions playing in the biggest market in the world in giant stadiums with all the glamor that comes with America’s wealth and power?
Super Bowl - biggest world championship by TV viewership, not to mention commerical revenue, in the world. Nothing comes close. Soccer world cup is nowhere near as big on a one game basis, and it only comes once every 4 years so its like the olympics.
NBA Finals - World Championship in basketball.
World Series - World Championship in baseball.
Stanley Cup - World Championship in hockey.
All dominated by America. Foreigners are free to enter these leagues, but still make a tiny minority of the leagues dominated by AMericans.
Good post. I would put it down to those three as well, but there is one more that I think most people are missing: our culture. Our culture is based on capitalistic competition, we are the most aggressive, assertive and competitive cuture on the planet. Its why I think India is so poor at sports, they just don’t have the same masculine culture of domination and aggressiveness.
Think about our sports, its all about being dominant and we glorify not the playmaker or creative guy who has “court vision”, but the biggest, strongest, fastest most physically dominant members of our society (LeBron) by giving them huge money and attention in performing physical athletic feats.
Soccer players could not enter a NFL game and survive, while most NFL players could enter a soccer game and fit in for the game just fine, even if only as defenders who have to kick the ball away. Soccer players could only be placekickers and that’s it. They’re too small, too weak, too feminine, too slow, it would be like putting some random accountant onto a NFL field. Total destruction.
Oh please, you Brits are so jelous of our dominance in sports that soccer is the only thing you have, yet we still tied you (sorry drawed you) in the game. So our 4th string athletes are as good as your 1st string. Most our our soccer team is made up of scrubs that couldn’t make it into better, higher paying sports like the NFL or MLB, they’re the guys that had no date for Prom because all the chicks wanted to go with the football quarterback, not some little skinny soccer player. I bet if we sent our NFL and NBA players to the world cup, we’d clean house and win 1st place every time. You already know this, so you should be happy we don’t care about soccer, because its the only thing you have left and we’d win that too.
America: #1 in sour grapes too, apparently.
Plenty of Americans play soccer and care about it. Yet we suck.
Fuck yeah! #1!! #1!! USA! USA!
australia!!! Fuck yeah, mate!!!