[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
malonetd wrote:
LOL@ all the people calling golf not a sport. I’d love to hear your definition of a sport. And yes, I’ve heard them all before and they’ve all been torn apart.
LOL@ stokedporcupine for bringing math and probability into this discussion.
I’m not bringing probability into the discussion, I’m bringing common sense into it. Almost everyone in this thread is talking about anything BUT what sport it is the hardest to become the best in.
Some people are talking about which sport is the hardest to play, some people are talking about which sport is the hardest to rate who’s the best in, some people are having an overall “my sport is more badass then your sport” argument, etc.
Most of you guys are also confusing how hard a sport potentially is with how high the actual skill players of the game have. I’ll given an example. Say that it’s really really hard to hit a baseball which is thrown at 90 mph… this doesn’t mean that there’s something intrinsically hard about hitting a baseball, it just means that the current level in skill in baseball is really high.
If there were only a hand full of people playing baseball as a hobby the fastest pitches might only be 50 mph, and in that case hitting a baseball wouldn’t be hard at all. Anyway the point is that even the skills or athleticism needed to play a sport depends largely on who’s playing, not the sport itself.
Since more people playing tends to create higher standards, again even this comes down to how many people play the game.
The predominant factor at how hard it is to become the best at a sport is how many people play the sport–the more people that play the more people there are to compete against and the higher the standards of competition will be raised.
EDIT: I’m not the only one in this thread who’s made this point either.[/quote]
This is kind of the opposite to the point that I was trying to make.
More people means more experience to draw from, more potential to be able to practice your sport and realise your potential…
If there was only a handful of people playing baseball, and the pitchers were only throwing at 50mph, it wouldn’t be any easier to hit the ball, because you would still be only practicing against people who are pitching at 50mph. It has to work both ways.
Take the motorsports (formula 1, superbike whatever it doesn’t matter) for example, go back 10-15 years, the vehicles were slower… does that mean that the drivers at the time were alot less skilled? Of course not! They were still the fastest drivers of their time. Just because they were slow by todays standards doesn’t mean anything as to the skill level involved.
And even if you took the number one driver from today, and took him back in time, it doesn’t mean that he would have an easy time beating the competition from back then. In fact, he’d probably suck because he’d be use to the new vehicles, advances that have been made etc…
I still think in general all sports are just as hard to get to be number-one in, in that there surely is no sport that has such low standards (compared to peoples general natural ability) that you could just take the number one spot without trying bloody hard.
Although it did occur to me that certain sports have had a particular big standout- huge talent that would be very hard to eclipse, while other sports have had many “greats” but not one over-all, widely accepted “best” ever.
So I guess what I’m saying is that these sports that have had a particular big standout, are probably the hardest to take the number one spot in, because the bar is set so high.
