Quote:
Originally Posted by Wingate1217
All I was saying is that you can't compare the two. Any sport requires a degree of athleticism coupled with skill...although one my be harder to achieve than the other....
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I understand your point, and I largely agree with it. I'm just saying that the question, what is athleticism, what is sport, is even a bit more subjective than what your point suggests. What defines athleticism, and what defines sport? I wouldn't say darts is a sport, or that a great darts thrower is a great athlete. But you could argue that excellence in darts requires innate hand-eye coordination. Darts is largely a skill game, but so too is basketall, or baseball, or football, and fundamentally, there's no way to separate learned skill from athleticism, in virtually any competitive endeavor.
And the same is true of any "athletic" endeavor outside of a core of purely physical measurements. Because the real measure of "can you do activity x" is not whether you can do it, it's whether you can do it better than everyone else. I could never run a 4.4 forty, but I can hit a 300+ yard drive down the middle. I just can't do it as often as Tiger, or virtually any other golfer on tour. Given enough whacks at it, I could probably hit a 100 mph fastball once. I just couldn't do it as often as an MLB player. My point is that this is a completely subjective question, on all fronts. I agree with you that you can't compare sports. I'd just go a step further and say that you can't really objectively say what sports are, or what athleticism is, unless you restrict yourself to a core definition that only includes fundamental measurables of speed, strength, leaping ability, etc. And by that measure, the "greatest athletes" would be determined in a training facility/laboratory, not on a field of competition