[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
dominating a pro sport in every aspect of the game doesnt?
Yeah, this guy I guess isn’t an athlete either.[/quote]
Reggie White > The Fridge
<3 Reggie
RIP
GSP?
Just throwing it out there.
in the superstars compitition, which was back in the 70’s, they took each top athlete in his current sport, put them in a contest against other top athletes in their sport. there was 10 different sports to participate in. the athlete choose 8 i think, but couldnt pick the one closest to what his spost was.( if a 100 yd track man was competing, he couldnt run the 100, cause that was one of the events.)
so joe frazier the boxer who is A GREAT ATHLETE, was in the 50 meter freestyle swimming. dove in, almost drowned, swam down and back, but finished, and being interviewed, he said he never swam before, so basically he as saving his own life going down and back. he also did terrible in the obsticle course run, did terrible in the hitting the golf ball 100 yards away from the hole.
i think the got 10 shots to see how close the could come to the hole. did terrible shooting baskets. . did terrible racing the bike around the track for a mile. did terrible and a few other events.so is joe a bad athlete? great athlete at boxing, terrible at all other athletics. devoting his whole life to be heavyweight champ of the world, didnt give him much time to swim, hit golf balls, ride a bike… etc. so two meanings to great athlete in my mind…
[quote]spk wrote:
in the superstars compitition, which was back in the 70’s, they took each top athlete in his current sport, put them in a contest against other top athletes in their sport. there was 10 different sports to participate in. the athlete choose 8 i think, but couldnt pick the one closest to what his spost was.( if a 100 yd track man was competing, he couldnt run the 100, cause that was one of the events.)
so joe frazier the boxer who is A GREAT ATHLETE, was in the 50 meter freestyle swimming. dove in, almost drowned, swam down and back, but finished, and being interviewed, he said he never swam before, so basically he as saving his own life going down and back. he also did terrible in the obsticle course run, did terrible in the hitting the golf ball 100 yards away from the hole.
i think the got 10 shots to see how close the could come to the hole. did terrible shooting baskets. . did terrible racing the bike around the track for a mile. did terrible and a few other events.so is joe a bad athlete? great athlete at boxing, terrible at all other athletics. devoting his whole life to be heavyweight champ of the world, didnt give him much time to swim, hit golf balls, ride a bike… etc. so two meanings to great athlete in my mind…[/quote]
I think it proves that some sports produce great sports specific athetes. And some sports by what they do to get better, create great athletes. There are great all around athletes that go into a specific sport (Roy Jones Jr) boxing. There are specific sport athletes that dominate at there specific sport because of their specific skills or size (Shaq…George Foreman). The question is what sport produces the best well rounded athletes? Through their off-season work and training I still stand by skilled position athletes in American Football. They train and work on every aspect the OP listed as criteria for the nomination
[quote]pstianb wrote:
GSP?
Just throwing it out there.[/quote]
GSP is an incredible and well-rounded athlete for sure. But the question was about the sport rather than individual athletes and I don’t think MMA comes top of the list. I don’t think you HAVE to be particularly strong, explosive or agile (though all of those qualities obv help). I think there are plenty of mixed martial artists who do extremely well due to great technique with moderate athletic abilities.
But yeah I completely agree that GSP is a beast and is incredibly explosive, strong, agile and has great endurance.
[quote]furo wrote:
[quote]pstianb wrote:
GSP?
Just throwing it out there.[/quote]
GSP is an incredible and well-rounded athlete for sure. But the question was about the sport rather than individual athletes and I don’t think MMA comes top of the list. I don’t think you HAVE to be particularly strong, explosive or agile (though all of those qualities obv help). I think there are plenty of mixed martial artists who do extremely well due to great technique with moderate athletic abilities.
But yeah I completely agree that GSP is a beast and is incredibly explosive, strong, agile and has great endurance. [/quote]
I agree
so if the question is “what sport produces the best rounded athletes”
its gotta be the deacthletes in track and field.
Decathlon athletes are some of the worlds greatest athletes. Yeah, I guess you are right? I just see track and field events differently in my head than bball/football. Decathlon is a sport. And, it is designed to see who the best all around athlete is…so yeah I was wrong
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]gregron wrote:
I am not going to argue semantics with you. If you honestly believe in your heart that Babe Ruth is the greatest athlete of all time then that’s on you.[/quote]
Of course he’s the greatest athlete of all-time. “Great athlete” does not restrict itself to athletic potential. At some point, you have to acknowledge that THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of being an athlete is the ability to translate it into success. Otherwise, all the talent in the world doesn’t mean shit.
Talent=/=great athlete.
And if we’re talking about well-rounded athletes let’s not forget that part of being well-rounded is being successful. No one dominated their sport relative to the rest of the sport the way Ruth dominated baseball.
And let’s dispense with the notion that hitting a baseball isn’t hard. The fact is that it’s arguably the single hardest thing to do in any sport. I don’t care how strong you are, how quick your reaction time is and all that. You are NOT going to step onto a field and put the ball in play against a pitcher throwing 95 mph and you certainly are never going to hit one of his pitches out of the ballpark. There’s a reason why it takes a long time to reach the majors. Virtually all other sports can be mastered in far less time and at younger ages. But the skill level required to succeed in baseball is higher than all others. I suppose golf might be the one sport that is harder to master than baseball, but the sheer lack of athleticism required to hit a golf ball is nowhere near what it is in baseball. A lot of former athletes get extremely good at golf; it doesn’t work the other way around, ever. Look at all the athletes who have played football and baseball at the same time. Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders were great football players but they were both actually pretty shitty baseball players in comparison.
Anyways, back to translating athleticism into success. Part of being a great athlete or a well-rounded one is the ability to use that athleticism to succeed in competition. Otherwise, what is that athletic talent good for? It doesn’t matter who has the greater potential. PERFORMANCE is what quantifies an athlete. We don’t measure the talent of an athlete by the way he looks or the way he performs a select few drills or whatever.
If that were the case then the biggest freaks at each NFL combine would be the best players the next year. But that is rarely the case. Chris Johnson is way faster than Frank Gore. Who’s the better athlete? Frank Gore, because he’s proven he can UTILIZE that talent in a way that Johnson has not.[/quote]
This post is hilarious coming from the man that called Dan Marino ‘the perfect QB.’ I mean, he won no rings, so obviously he wasn’t perfect, because perfect would insinuate he had the perfect ability to translate his (I’ll leave a blank here for you to tell me what word describes A PLAYER’S PHYSICAL ABILITY AT THE SPORT HE PLAYS, because apparently we don’t agree that athleticism or talent is that word) into success.
We all know this thread/argument has become about who can type someone else out of the argument in a war of intellectualism and semantics; it most certainly isn’t about ‘well rounded athletes’ anymore that’s for sure.
If you asked the general population of the world to describe an ‘athlete’, they wouldn’t mention ‘ability to translate talent, tangible or intangible(although I guess this secret athletic criteria would itself also be intangible and unable to be produced by a sport, which means we should throw it out anyway, but that wouldn’t make for fun typing) into success.’ They would most certainly talk about how fast, strong, ‘mobile’(lateral speed, ability to change direction, etc) coordinated(can you contort yourself in abnormal ways to complete the required activity, can your limbs and extremities react to stimulus from your brain accurately and in a timely fashion), durable(toss endurance in with this), etc an ‘athlete’ is. They may say that dominating a sport more than others have other done it makes a given athlete better than his peers, that’s true and I will cede that, but it’s completely irrelevant to this discussion and I honestly have no idea why it got brought up(I mean, I know it got brought up because the Babe was mentioned, but the context never meshed with the discussion).
I’m really interested in how you will find congruence with the idea that the perfect qb could not win anything though, given your diatribe about ‘the best athlete’ having the ability to translate whatever descriptive word you come up with here, into success.
YAY TEXT.
I WANT to keep arguing, but uhh… umm…
Enough said.
Pushharder; still a visitor of the Camel Toe Report.
this conversation turned into MJ vs the field. that’s got to tell you something right there. I’m going to nominate champ bailey. i had the privilege of playing pick up basketball with Champ once. He mostly half assed it out there, but when he did turn it on… it felt like we were playing against a different species.
Thanx for the posts Push, makes me miss SAMA.
[quote]red04 wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]gregron wrote:
I am not going to argue semantics with you. If you honestly believe in your heart that Babe Ruth is the greatest athlete of all time then that’s on you.[/quote]
Of course he’s the greatest athlete of all-time. “Great athlete” does not restrict itself to athletic potential. At some point, you have to acknowledge that THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of being an athlete is the ability to translate it into success. Otherwise, all the talent in the world doesn’t mean shit.
Talent=/=great athlete.
And if we’re talking about well-rounded athletes let’s not forget that part of being well-rounded is being successful. No one dominated their sport relative to the rest of the sport the way Ruth dominated baseball.
And let’s dispense with the notion that hitting a baseball isn’t hard. The fact is that it’s arguably the single hardest thing to do in any sport. I don’t care how strong you are, how quick your reaction time is and all that. You are NOT going to step onto a field and put the ball in play against a pitcher throwing 95 mph and you certainly are never going to hit one of his pitches out of the ballpark. There’s a reason why it takes a long time to reach the majors. Virtually all other sports can be mastered in far less time and at younger ages. But the skill level required to succeed in baseball is higher than all others. I suppose golf might be the one sport that is harder to master than baseball, but the sheer lack of athleticism required to hit a golf ball is nowhere near what it is in baseball. A lot of former athletes get extremely good at golf; it doesn’t work the other way around, ever. Look at all the athletes who have played football and baseball at the same time. Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders were great football players but they were both actually pretty shitty baseball players in comparison.
Anyways, back to translating athleticism into success. Part of being a great athlete or a well-rounded one is the ability to use that athleticism to succeed in competition. Otherwise, what is that athletic talent good for? It doesn’t matter who has the greater potential. PERFORMANCE is what quantifies an athlete. We don’t measure the talent of an athlete by the way he looks or the way he performs a select few drills or whatever.
If that were the case then the biggest freaks at each NFL combine would be the best players the next year. But that is rarely the case. Chris Johnson is way faster than Frank Gore. Who’s the better athlete? Frank Gore, because he’s proven he can UTILIZE that talent in a way that Johnson has not.[/quote]
This post is hilarious coming from the man that called Dan Marino ‘the perfect QB.’ I mean, he won no rings, so obviously he wasn’t perfect, because perfect would insinuate he had the perfect ability to translate his (I’ll leave a blank here for you to tell me what word describes A PLAYER’S PHYSICAL ABILITY AT THE SPORT HE PLAYS, because apparently we don’t agree that athleticism or talent is that word) into success.
We all know this thread/argument has become about who can type someone else out of the argument in a war of intellectualism and semantics; it most certainly isn’t about ‘well rounded athletes’ anymore that’s for sure.
If you asked the general population of the world to describe an ‘athlete’, they wouldn’t mention ‘ability to translate talent, tangible or intangible(although I guess this secret athletic criteria would itself also be intangible and unable to be produced by a sport, which means we should throw it out anyway, but that wouldn’t make for fun typing) into success.’ They would most certainly talk about how fast, strong, ‘mobile’(lateral speed, ability to change direction, etc) coordinated(can you contort yourself in abnormal ways to complete the required activity, can your limbs and extremities react to stimulus from your brain accurately and in a timely fashion), durable(toss endurance in with this), etc an ‘athlete’ is. They may say that dominating a sport more than others have other done it makes a given athlete better than his peers, that’s true and I will cede that, but it’s completely irrelevant to this discussion and I honestly have no idea why it got brought up(I mean, I know it got brought up because the Babe was mentioned, but the context never meshed with the discussion).
I’m really interested in how you will find congruence with the idea that the perfect qb could not win anything though, given your diatribe about ‘the best athlete’ having the ability to translate whatever descriptive word you come up with here, into success.
YAY TEXT.[/quote]
What’s even more hilarious is that I never said Marino was the perfect QB. I was the one who was arguing he was NOT the perfect QB, you fucking jackass.
[quote]cubuff2028 wrote:
this conversation turned into MJ vs the field. that’s got to tell you something right there. I’m going to nominate champ bailey. i had the privilege of playing pick up basketball with Champ once. He mostly half assed it out there, but when he did turn it on… it felt like we were playing against a different species. [/quote]
Again showing Football>Bball
2 former rugby players who aren’t seeing the field much this year ARE in fact on NFL contracts in NON kicking positions.
Nate Ebner - New England Patriots - special teams - I think he might have had a background in football in HS. He was recruited from the OSU rugby team. If he stuck around in Rugby he would have played on the national 7’s team on a pro contract.
Hayden Smith - Former basketball player from Australia. Came to the USA to play DII collegiate basketball. During one of his summers he befriended some of the national team players for USA rugby. They got him out on the field, and he had a background playing a little rugby as a schoolboy. He made the USA national team, and played for the London Saracens, the equivalent of the Yankees/Red Sox/Patriots/Lakers in England Rugby.
He is currently 3rd on the Jet’s depth chart at tight end. His first down playing a live football game was during preseason this year.