There are about thirty million young boys in the United States who would like to become professional basketball, baseball, or football players. Their heroes are Michael Jordan, Ken Griffey Jr., O. J. Simpson.
Well, scratch Simpson.
For middle and upper class children, it is a dream that can only be sustained with continuous development and tangible, immediate rewards. Most of these kids will sensibly give up the dream before they get to college. They know that their odds are not really very good. They know that the amount of work and dedication required is astronomical, when weighed in proportion to the chances of success, of becoming a professional athlete.
For those other children… they will try to be the best player on their team. If they attain that goal, they will try to be the best in their league. If, through some miracle, they reach that plateau, the best in the city. The best in the region. The best in the state. Maybe even the best in the country.
The thing is that even if you are the best in the region, and even if you are drafted #1 by a professional sports team, your odds of making it are still not all that great. For reasons that no one seems very clear about, the percentage of high draft choices who actually become stars is not very great. You would be surprised. Look at a list of the top five draft choices for Major League Baseball for each of the last ten years. Recognize any names? A few, yes. But who are all these other guys, and what are they doing now? Selling cars? Installing aluminum siding? Dealing dope?
For many poor kids, a career as a professional athlete is their only possible escape from poverty and powerlessness. Professional sports. Or drugs.
If you believe television, the movies, radio, books, magazines, and pretty well every other tin-voiced conduit of illusions in our society, the way you make to the major leagues, the big time, the Olympics, the “show”, is through very, very hard work and determination. The coaches tell you this: they want their players to work hard at practices. The players tell you this: they want you to think that they earn millions of dollars not just because they are talented but also because they are virtuous. The Owners of the teams tell you this: they want you to believe that paying a high school dropout $20 million a year is a good “investment”. The media tells you this: because it is what you want to believe.
Is this one of the great deceptions of our time?
How many athletes, do you suppose, start out with merely average talent, and then improve to the level of play required to become a professional?
Not many. Consider that the best player in an averaged size town– the best of all the kids his age in that town– is not likely to make it. Not likely at all. How does the best kid in Peoria stack up against the best kid in Brooklyn? He doesn’t have a chance, unless he is truly remarkable.
Yet we continue to pedal this illusion that it is hard work and determination that makes the difference between great athletes and merely good athletes. But we don’t even believe it ourselves. Every high school coach has a well-stocked bench of average kids under the illusion that they will get playing time if they “stick it out”. They won’t. Only the most talented will play, at least in the games that matter. The coach knows this even as he spews his nonsense about “hard work and determination”.
The situation is analogous to the world of business. Successful entrepreneurs want you to believe that they got rich through hard work and determination, and through taking “risks” with their capital. But if you investigate further, you will find that most of these successful entrepreneurs had money to begin with. And that is the simplest and truest rule of success in our society: to those with much, more shall be given.