Playing Professional Sports Is NOT a Privilege

Last week I began an argument that is likely to be unpopular to most American sports fans who read it. The entry draft system, as employed by all of the major American professional sports leagues, operates in a vacuum devoid of common sense or fairness to most of the participants in the process. I said in Part I that the public has been duped into believing professional athletes should be thankful for the privilege of playing a sport for a living, much to the delight of the greedy team owners. This is a point that bears revisiting, as it is a mindset that allows the public to continue backing a broken system.

|In a perfect world where all of us could do whatever we wanted to do for a living, many of us would choose to be professional athletes. And why not? We love sports, we'd love the attention and we sure as heck would love the money. However, it is not a perfect world and many of us can't do what we we would ideally do for a living. Why? Because God or evolution or genetics or life being unfair didn't grant us the height, strength, speed and other attributes needed to compete at a professional level. So, to answer the question 'Why am I not a professional athlete?', the answer is simple. We can't! I like to think I was a decent ballplayer at one point in my life, but if I took the court against NBA players I would be destroyed. That is the reality of the situation. It is why so many people rip professional athletes or try to live vicariously through them. We want so badly to do what they do, and the frustration of not being able to manifests itself in all sorts of unhealthy vitriol.


Look at it this way. How many people are paying to watch your Sunday softball team play? Or you rec hoops squad? That would be none. Zero. Zilch. We tune in to see the games we love played at the highest level. They are played at the highest level because the players are the best in the world at what they do. The product (the league, the sport, etc) is great but without the best athletes the product becomes watered down. Athletes possess a rare skill set that the leagues need to hold our attention. Someone being able to have a job you wish you had does NOT make it a privilege.