Sens Rule
Registered User
- Sep 22, 2005
- 21,251
- 74
You are missing the point.
A person who is a great athlete chooses their sport. They then become great at that sport, no matter what it is.
If Gretzky loved Tennis, he would have dominated it. If Pele was a baseball fanatic he would have been better than Willie Mays.
Don't get side tracked by "Gretzky was only 6'0" so he could NEVER have played basketball". That is not the point. The point is, great athletes dominate their sport of choice.
I agree to an extent. But different sports require different skills. Hockey is a sport that requires possibly the most different skills of any sport you could imagine. You need perfect co-ordination of your hands and feet at the same time and need to play a game at a speed that is not comparable to any other sport. And you need to accept ridiculous amounts of physical contact at all times.
Golf is a sport that does not require a team, and is all about being mentally strong, but it is more similar to darts or horseshoes or even poker than it is to a sport like hockey.
Baseball is a tough sport to master. It does not require you to be particularly overal athletic like Soccer or hockey or basketball but it does require you to have crazy hand eye co-ordination to hit the ball, or freakish cannyness in pitching a ball.
Michael Jordan even if he was always playing baseball as a kid and loved the sport may never have been a great baseball player. Maybe he would have made the major leagues but maybe he would not.
What I am saying is that sports are different, Gretzky might have turned out to be a great tennis, baseball, lacrosse, basketball, golf player. But more likely than not while he would excel at any sport and maybe get to the 99th percentile in it, that is a far stretch from being major league caliber in it or being the absoulute best in it.
Joe Thorpe the greatest athlete ever, was alot better track athlete and football player than he was at baseball. I mean take most players in the NBA, they could play centerfield easy defensively, maybe be gold glovers but could they hit a major league slider, or a Clemens fastball, or be able to figure out what the heck Greg Maddux was doing with his pitches and never get more than an infield out off him.
How many Olympic decathletes who it would seem are the perfect athletes every ended up playing a pro sport after? Even a position like a wide reciever, or DB in football which is a position of near pure athletics? Not very many have though you would think many would try since the $$$ would be so much better.
But the argument about Gretzky playing Defence and Centre is not apples to oranges, or apples to lettuce. It is red delicious apples vs yellow delicious apples.
Bobby Hull coulda played defence and Doug Harvey coulda played forward. Would they have had as much success, probably a bit less since they had their positions for a reason but surely any of the 50 or 100 greatest hockey players at forward or defence could have competantly played the other position at a high level if they need to or wanted to or if fate jsut dictated they did.