I wonder how much of this comes from the Michael Jordan mythology. He’s someone who, despite being possibly the single most competitive athlete ever to exist, ALSO used these weird little tricks and fake conflicts to rule himself up.
So everyone now reads his story and thinks, “I have to do that too! That can make me like MJ!” And “nobody believes in us” is a cheap and easy way to do it.
Though that also goes to show that inventing conflict can be the way that competitive people make themselves competitive. If even Jordan did it, who are we to criticize?
Yup was just going to mention this. "Nobody believes in us" doesn't always make sense, but it doesn't have to. It's just a way to pysch yourself up.
Tom Brady does the same thing. He still holds grudges against everyone who passed on him in the draft, where he fell to the 6th round. I'd say it's worked out for him.
Yeah professional athletes seem to just have a psychology that needs them to thrive under conditions of disrespect. Makes sense since opponents and fans are talking shit the whole time.
Tom Brady will probably be better than ever next year since, for the first time in 20 years, people are now actually insulting him and meaning it. All for his pathetic existence of making the NFL Playoffs and being forced to date 20 year old Instagram models.
The narrative is far older than Simmons. You can trace it at least to movies like Major League. I might cite the 1980 USA hockey win as the proto underdog story that launched the popularity of the narrative. Now everyone wants to be the underdog.
I’m reminded of this passage from Elif Batuman’s wonderful novel “The Idiot”:
“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
I once drunkenly told my best friend when he was single and depressed, “you’re not the underdog! You’re the TOP DOG!!” He went on to marry a doctor. I like to think my speech had something to do with it.
If you watch college football, where the gradient of talent is much higher than the pros, it's even more ridiculous. Players on teams like Alabama, the most dominant program in the past 15 years and preseason favorites damn near every season, will talk about how disrespected they are and how nobody believed in them. Credit to Coach Saban for somehow getting his team to believe this in order to motivate them, but holy hell is it annoying to listen to.
The Georgia team this year was nauseating in this respect. They were never ranked below #3 in the country and spent most of the season ranked #1. One of their players had the gall to say "they expected us to be 7-5". Just stop. Please.
I feel like these "nobody believes in us" narratives are less about trying hard and more about stoking feelings of teamwork and togetherness. Us against the world. It's undeniably motivating, but I agree with Freddie that these players don't typically need motivation. It's also uniting, which is probably the objective rather than motivation.
I'm sure the fact that it's a juicy media story plays a part.
This is, in my experience, exactly right. I am aware of sports teams having naysaying headlines pinned up in the locker room. "I told you so" is an extremely powerful motivator. Yes, players who have made it to the elite professional leagues are almost definitionally ultra-hard working. Barring a few cases of obscene natural talent, they'd have been filtered out long ago were they not able to exert almost superhuman levels of effort. But perhaps the idea of fighting against an unjust perception gives them that little 1% extra aggression.
What I don't think is that it particularly hurts anything. It is a bit trite, sure, and its impact is probably very small, but you could say the same about almost anything mindset-related in sports. Yet despite this, sports psychology remains a very active field (and the part of sports I'm interested in, personally speaking.)
I'm not surprised to hear players say things along the lines of "nobody believes in us." The season is a grind. Training, practices, travel, injuries, all of it. I think a lot of players, even the superstars, have to come up with ways to push themselves, not for the big games, but for the endless hours of work between the games. My unprovable theory is that as rivalries between cites/teams/players fade due to the current nature of the business of professional sports, the "nobody believes in us" theme became more common.
Which is all separate from hearing about it... I'd be fine to retire that line of reporting forever.
It sells tickets'n'things. It amps up the drama. Didn't you watch all five seasons of Friday Night Lights? Coach Eric had to be fired and then hired by the Lions so he could coach and win with the UNDERDOGS.
I feel like this sports mythos is inseparable from the broader capitalist mythos. Success is never *just* family wealth, knowing the right people, having the exact right genetics and training -- there has to be this secret ingredient that theoretically anyone can access.
In media the secret ingredient is usually getting bullied as a kid. The “disrespected” narrative is getting bullied as a kid for grown-ups who are clearly preternaturally talented at their preferred thing, and have been for most of their lives.
(Not to ignore the importance of work. But hard work isn't some separate thing from all the luck and talent but has to go hand-in-hand with it.)
Sometimes the underdog background narratives the announcers get fed are truly laughable. I feel like several times I hear things like "he was only 5'2" in 8th grade," and I'm like is that even short for 8th grade? Why is this athlete still thinking about 8th grade? But I guess they need a chip on their shoulder to drive them.
The Bengals’ players also kept harping on how disrespectful it is to sell tickets to a neutral site KC v. Buf AFCCG before the outcome of the divisional round...but their organization was also selling tickets for a KC v. Cinci AFCCG at that time.
If it makes you feel any better, this Boston Celtics (who have the best record in the NBA) have gone on the record saying that literally everyone believes in them this year.
This is deep in our psyche. To root for the underdog in books, films, sports, and the news. To feel a little zing when the underdog triumphs. The comebacks. Even you, who seem to be doing well for yourself now, must feel redeemed from those who did not think you would amount to much. Even at great heights, the acclaimed feel disrespect from someone. You cannot tell me you don't or that this does not motivate you in some way.
Geez. C'mon. Do we really need to hear whining from you about a truth of human nature?
You're assuming something there's no reason to assume, though. Where is any evidence that a team saying no one believes in them actually helps push them to perform slightly better?
Right, but that doesn't make it true - which I think is the point of the post. That there's no reason to actually believe it works, and it's just something players say as one of a million other cliches; there's no reason to take it any more seriously as a true phenomenon than "I went out there and just tried not to do too much" is a real admission that a player did fewer actions on the court or field.
That’s a strange view of evidence though- there’s no evidence it doesn’t work, and if players are actually using it as motivation, they are in the best position to know what motivates them- certainly more than non-professional athletes.
When the Eagles did it in 2017 they managed to make it fun. Best record in the conference but the betting underdog bc of the Wentz injury … they leaned into the ‘dogs’ part and made it fun for fans by wearing ridiculous masks, etc.
FdB maybe still annoyed by it but as an admitted homer think the 2017 Eagles show how you can have the underdog mentality without turning it into some weird combination of whiny emo and the guy grunting as loud as he can in the gym.
Tim Dillon had this hilarious bit on his podcast last year where he essentially said that athletes are all inherently stupid and should never be asked to think deeply about anything bc that’s not their job. Every time they try to think deep they should just block that out, shut up and hit the ball. No one’s paying them to use their brains so they shouldn’t even try.
Obviously this is incredibly crude and there are some athletes that are insanely intelligent. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it almost every time they step up to the mic post game. You have to remember at the NFL level, the vast majority of these guys have been absolutely worshipped from a young age. At 12 years old they’re dominating their pee wee football league, at 17 they’re kings of high school dominating their league, they then get a college scholarship and go to some major college where they are royalty on campus and treated as such. All along the way football is their ticket and their life is structured in such a way that ‘everything else’ that makes a person interesting matters as little as possible. It’s no surprise that they reach the NFL and don’t have many interesting thoughts about the world, they never really had to think deeply about anything. Even the NFL players that ppl consider “smart” (like Aaron Rodgers) still usually sound like idiots around actual smart people.
I think we demand way too much out of athletes today, we expect them all to be positive role models. It’s just not realistic given the life so many of them live from a young age. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people, or that they’re inherently dumb, it’s just that they grow up in a world where character and intelligence don’t matter much.
Again, obviously there’s exceptions (look at John Urschel), and it actually varies from sport to sport. For example, I’ve been listening to JRE MMA podcasts more lately, and it’s been somewhat surprising how thoughtful and interesting s lot of the top fighters are. It makes sense though, considering the glamour only comes at the very top of those sports. There’s not 100,000 people watching their first amateur fights, and it’s an absolute grind to the top. They often also get their ass kicked along the way, as opposed to just always being the best. As a result these guys tend to develop personalities along the way.
I have always thought it bizarre that a human who focuses solely on their looks is considered vain and shallow, but one whose life is focused on playing a sport is considered dedicated. It's not as is pro athletes were distinguished by their elevated moral qualities.
If some female were in fact as dedicated to her looks as a pro athlete is to their chosen sport, would we stop calling her vain? I doubt it. She'd still be vain and looks-obsessed, if anything more so.
For that matter, having met enough athletes and models, I'm not at all convinced that they are so different.
I disagree that looks and sports are the same, and athletes are INSANELY dedicated. Honestly that’s the unquestionable positive role model attribute that they have. The amount of work they put into their sport to get to the top level generally goes beyond the level that most “regular people” ever put into anything. The margin of error and level of competition is so slim, and you constantly hear about guys not making it because of their lack of focus. It’s literally the most important thing outside of natural ability.
I'm not convinced that's true, not to mention that there are plenty of successful athletes that shut down clubs, but still perform on game day. Nobody judges them the less, just as nobody lionizes math prodigies who dedicate their waking hours and a substantial portion of their dreamtime to whatever it is that math prodigies obsess over.
For that matter, if some chick were in fact that dedicated to her looks, would we stop calling her vain?
I think you've got your orders of magnitude wrong there. There's no amount of dedication to looks that would match the dedication required of a professional athlete. Managing your looks just isn't as proportionally difficult. It doesn't have as narrow a margin for error.
But I will concede the math point. It's terrible how little our culture values that. There's a good point to be made there. But comparing professional athletics to mere vanity is absurd.
Sports focus on important values such as teamwork, leadership, courage, self sacrafice, respect for opponents and teammates, sportsmanship, overcoming adversity, etc.
If you focus on your looks but never make it as a pro model you’ve probably wasted your time. If you focus on sports and never make it pro, odds are it was still one of the most important things you’ve ever done. No one who played sports thinks it was a waste of time.
There are moral qualities in sports that apply across the board, therefore all people who play sports will benefit from these moral benefits. Pro athletes make up 0.0001% of people who ever play sports, and the thing about them is that they never have to apply anything outside of their sport because it’s just not relevant given how good they are. But this does not at all mean there are no moral qualities to sports, there absolutely are.
Yes, individual and team sports have different qualities. Both teach valuable lessons to the people who do them.
I have no idea what most failed models do, it’s honesty just such a ridiculous comparison.
The “shut up and dribble” response is often quite reasonable, and can be extended to some extent to other talents: actors, singers, dancers. That is really a critique of celebrity and our obsession with it.
I agree. 7 foot 22 year olds who have had thousand of people watching them since they were 14 are now expected to have developed opinions on climate change or whatever. It’s really ridiculous and 100% a product of our obsession with celebrity and social medias magnification of that.
I think elite athletes are generally more intelligent than they’re given credit for but they’ve spent their entire lives focusing only on one thing. Playing any sport at an elite level is an incredibly complicated endeavor mentally.
In my experience, certain types of athletic endeavor, for instance, American football, do require a specific kind of intelligence, although a type of intelligence very different from book smarts. Theoreticians of combat call this type of intelligence "situational awareness". Basically it's the ability to instantly size up and react to unfolding events, and at the same time, to predict and control how they will play out.
This sort of intelligence is also seen in beat cops, feral cats and jazz musicians. As noted previously, this has little to do with book smarts, and may in fact correlate negatively with book smarts or cognitive intelligence. You don't need or want an NFL cornerback who is thinking about the design of the Space Shuttle as he waits for the snap. At the same time, the Oakland Raiders had a track record of drafting prospects with phenomenal raw athletic talent, but poor football skills. The logic behind this was that football smarts could be coached, but sub 4.4 speed could not. This made seeming sense, but it rarely worked in practice. The result was a football player who looked like Tarzan, played like Jane.
Other types of athletic competition, such as sprinting or figure skating, probably don't require so much smarts of any kind.
I don’t know, I kind of buy the NBIU thing. NFL athletes play at an extremely high level all season, and need to get to an even higher level in the playoffs, so any bit of psychological motivation to get their can help. Having a bit of a chip on your shoulder can certainly help with focus, especially during an NFL playoff run where there are plenty of distractions (media etc). I’m not going to pretend I understand the psychology or professional athletes, but the difficulties of maintaining focus at while performing at a high level (and pushing yourself to that extra level of performance) seems to be an issue on most fields.
Same reason players coaches tend to not trash talk other teams - trash talk will end up being used as motivation for the opposing team. It may be all BS, but it doesn’t matter if it helps someone perform even better.
I think the respect narrative is a ubiquitous thing in the history of sports perpetrated by the top sports writers and talking heads mostly on radio, but now on podcasts and streaming too, and infested into and repeated by sports fans. Winning games and championships is the only way to change a legacy narrative of suckiness. But I have no problem with this cycle and how it motivates athletes to reach deeper in energy and effort.
Everything is team sports now.
Democrats and their MSM clones have adopted the same model negative branding Republicans. And it works. Republicans, even though powered by resentment from their fans, are less effective because they don’t have the same media influence and reach given the Democrat favoring government abuses of power in tech and social media to silence conservative voices. But try they do. Democrats suck is the message that repeats in their heads (I think there is truth to this myself). And hearing that motivates Democrats to vote party line out of resentment so they can suck more.
At least in professional sports there are rules, and reasonable consistent rules enforcement, to ensure fair competitive play. Not so in politics today where the rules are exploited, abused and ignored for political team advantage.
I do think that lack of respect motivating a team to perform is unique to football where raw energy and extra effort can return better results on plays. It does not work for say NBA play where talent and teamwork matters more.
The worst in playing that card were the Georgia Bulldogs. Preseason #1 team, never lost the ranking, and did not lose a game. Players after the title game saying that people thought they were going 7-5. Like literally nobody thought that. Not one person.
It's not as fun if no team or athlete ever "defied their critics," even if nobody ever defined, you know, who those critics actually were...
...or if they even existed. This mentality has seeped into college football dynasties over the last decade. After this year's College Football Playoff Championship, some (not all) of Georgia's players (who were celebrating a 65-7 drubbing of TCU), went on camera claiming they "defied the critics" who predicted they'd only win five or six games. The problem is that nobody ever said this or anything like it. Clemson has been guilty of this, too. During their CFB Playoff runs, Dabo Swinney mockingly used the "little ol' Clemson" moniker to prove to everyone that they actually were good enough to win titles against teams like Alabama, and while they may not have been as dominant a team as Georgia has been the past two years, nobody ever seriously doubted they were title contenders. And speaking of Alabama, at least to Nick Saban's credit (which pains me to admit), he made the argument this past season that his team would've been the betting favorite among the four playoff teams. But he's also been guilty in the past (or members of his staff, anyway) of letting his players believe they were serious underdogs, and that members of the "national media" didn't believe in them, which is utter nonsense in the Nick Saban era of Alabama football.
It's a bit different than the NFL example you gave, but it's in the same neighborhood re: incentive. Georgia had every incentive to become one of the very few teams in CFB to ever win back-to-back titles. A CFB Playoff trophy is certainly *enough* incentive on its own, but to accomplish consecutive title campaigns is a next-level achievement. They did that, and frankly they made it look rather effortless at times. I don't know why we can't have teams and athletes just be...really good at the one thing they've been recruited or paid (or both!) to do instead of manufacturing adversity where there is little or none to be found.
I wonder how much of this comes from the Michael Jordan mythology. He’s someone who, despite being possibly the single most competitive athlete ever to exist, ALSO used these weird little tricks and fake conflicts to rule himself up.
So everyone now reads his story and thinks, “I have to do that too! That can make me like MJ!” And “nobody believes in us” is a cheap and easy way to do it.
Though that also goes to show that inventing conflict can be the way that competitive people make themselves competitive. If even Jordan did it, who are we to criticize?
Yup was just going to mention this. "Nobody believes in us" doesn't always make sense, but it doesn't have to. It's just a way to pysch yourself up.
Tom Brady does the same thing. He still holds grudges against everyone who passed on him in the draft, where he fell to the 6th round. I'd say it's worked out for him.
Yeah professional athletes seem to just have a psychology that needs them to thrive under conditions of disrespect. Makes sense since opponents and fans are talking shit the whole time.
Tom Brady will probably be better than ever next year since, for the first time in 20 years, people are now actually insulting him and meaning it. All for his pathetic existence of making the NFL Playoffs and being forced to date 20 year old Instagram models.
The narrative is far older than Simmons. You can trace it at least to movies like Major League. I might cite the 1980 USA hockey win as the proto underdog story that launched the popularity of the narrative. Now everyone wants to be the underdog.
I’m reminded of this passage from Elif Batuman’s wonderful novel “The Idiot”:
“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
Everyone's an underdog sometimes.
I once drunkenly told my best friend when he was single and depressed, “you’re not the underdog! You’re the TOP DOG!!” He went on to marry a doctor. I like to think my speech had something to do with it.
America by-and-large has this collective conscious of being the Rodney Dangerfield's comedic "I can't get no respect" schtick
That's a beautiful quote - thanks!
And yes, you can tell the narrative is old because the term for a sports team overperforming in the post season is a "Cinderella story." :)
If you watch college football, where the gradient of talent is much higher than the pros, it's even more ridiculous. Players on teams like Alabama, the most dominant program in the past 15 years and preseason favorites damn near every season, will talk about how disrespected they are and how nobody believed in them. Credit to Coach Saban for somehow getting his team to believe this in order to motivate them, but holy hell is it annoying to listen to.
The Georgia team this year was nauseating in this respect. They were never ranked below #3 in the country and spent most of the season ranked #1. One of their players had the gall to say "they expected us to be 7-5". Just stop. Please.
Their QB was also 25 years old.
I feel like these "nobody believes in us" narratives are less about trying hard and more about stoking feelings of teamwork and togetherness. Us against the world. It's undeniably motivating, but I agree with Freddie that these players don't typically need motivation. It's also uniting, which is probably the objective rather than motivation.
I'm sure the fact that it's a juicy media story plays a part.
This is, in my experience, exactly right. I am aware of sports teams having naysaying headlines pinned up in the locker room. "I told you so" is an extremely powerful motivator. Yes, players who have made it to the elite professional leagues are almost definitionally ultra-hard working. Barring a few cases of obscene natural talent, they'd have been filtered out long ago were they not able to exert almost superhuman levels of effort. But perhaps the idea of fighting against an unjust perception gives them that little 1% extra aggression.
What I don't think is that it particularly hurts anything. It is a bit trite, sure, and its impact is probably very small, but you could say the same about almost anything mindset-related in sports. Yet despite this, sports psychology remains a very active field (and the part of sports I'm interested in, personally speaking.)
I'm not surprised to hear players say things along the lines of "nobody believes in us." The season is a grind. Training, practices, travel, injuries, all of it. I think a lot of players, even the superstars, have to come up with ways to push themselves, not for the big games, but for the endless hours of work between the games. My unprovable theory is that as rivalries between cites/teams/players fade due to the current nature of the business of professional sports, the "nobody believes in us" theme became more common.
Which is all separate from hearing about it... I'd be fine to retire that line of reporting forever.
It sells tickets'n'things. It amps up the drama. Didn't you watch all five seasons of Friday Night Lights? Coach Eric had to be fired and then hired by the Lions so he could coach and win with the UNDERDOGS.
I feel like this sports mythos is inseparable from the broader capitalist mythos. Success is never *just* family wealth, knowing the right people, having the exact right genetics and training -- there has to be this secret ingredient that theoretically anyone can access.
In media the secret ingredient is usually getting bullied as a kid. The “disrespected” narrative is getting bullied as a kid for grown-ups who are clearly preternaturally talented at their preferred thing, and have been for most of their lives.
(Not to ignore the importance of work. But hard work isn't some separate thing from all the luck and talent but has to go hand-in-hand with it.)
Sometimes the underdog background narratives the announcers get fed are truly laughable. I feel like several times I hear things like "he was only 5'2" in 8th grade," and I'm like is that even short for 8th grade? Why is this athlete still thinking about 8th grade? But I guess they need a chip on their shoulder to drive them.
The Bengals’ players also kept harping on how disrespectful it is to sell tickets to a neutral site KC v. Buf AFCCG before the outcome of the divisional round...but their organization was also selling tickets for a KC v. Cinci AFCCG at that time.
If it makes you feel any better, this Boston Celtics (who have the best record in the NBA) have gone on the record saying that literally everyone believes in them this year.
This is deep in our psyche. To root for the underdog in books, films, sports, and the news. To feel a little zing when the underdog triumphs. The comebacks. Even you, who seem to be doing well for yourself now, must feel redeemed from those who did not think you would amount to much. Even at great heights, the acclaimed feel disrespect from someone. You cannot tell me you don't or that this does not motivate you in some way.
Geez. C'mon. Do we really need to hear whining from you about a truth of human nature?
"The truth of human nature" does not compel the Kansas City Chiefs to pretend to be underdogs
But if it helps push the team to perform slightly better, does it matter whether it’s actually true?
You're assuming something there's no reason to assume, though. Where is any evidence that a team saying no one believes in them actually helps push them to perform slightly better?
It’s common for players themselves to use as motivation.
Right, but that doesn't make it true - which I think is the point of the post. That there's no reason to actually believe it works, and it's just something players say as one of a million other cliches; there's no reason to take it any more seriously as a true phenomenon than "I went out there and just tried not to do too much" is a real admission that a player did fewer actions on the court or field.
That’s a strange view of evidence though- there’s no evidence it doesn’t work, and if players are actually using it as motivation, they are in the best position to know what motivates them- certainly more than non-professional athletes.
If you don't think the Chiefs are underdogs against the Bengals, I'd be happy to take an even money bet for a reasonable amount. :)
But with that said, I'll gladly read a column from you yelling at clouds from time to time, as long as they're well written. :)
When the Eagles did it in 2017 they managed to make it fun. Best record in the conference but the betting underdog bc of the Wentz injury … they leaned into the ‘dogs’ part and made it fun for fans by wearing ridiculous masks, etc.
FdB maybe still annoyed by it but as an admitted homer think the 2017 Eagles show how you can have the underdog mentality without turning it into some weird combination of whiny emo and the guy grunting as loud as he can in the gym.
Yeah, I’m an Eagles fan and this is seared into my brain
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4BjOoXqLSHE
:)
That was different because NOBODY BELIEVED IN THEM.
I leave the proof for that to the only person in the national media who did believe in them:
https://youtu.be/OqQqZvWGubo
The Vikings were three point favorites in Philadelphia! The Vikings!!!!
Tim Dillon had this hilarious bit on his podcast last year where he essentially said that athletes are all inherently stupid and should never be asked to think deeply about anything bc that’s not their job. Every time they try to think deep they should just block that out, shut up and hit the ball. No one’s paying them to use their brains so they shouldn’t even try.
Obviously this is incredibly crude and there are some athletes that are insanely intelligent. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it almost every time they step up to the mic post game. You have to remember at the NFL level, the vast majority of these guys have been absolutely worshipped from a young age. At 12 years old they’re dominating their pee wee football league, at 17 they’re kings of high school dominating their league, they then get a college scholarship and go to some major college where they are royalty on campus and treated as such. All along the way football is their ticket and their life is structured in such a way that ‘everything else’ that makes a person interesting matters as little as possible. It’s no surprise that they reach the NFL and don’t have many interesting thoughts about the world, they never really had to think deeply about anything. Even the NFL players that ppl consider “smart” (like Aaron Rodgers) still usually sound like idiots around actual smart people.
I think we demand way too much out of athletes today, we expect them all to be positive role models. It’s just not realistic given the life so many of them live from a young age. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people, or that they’re inherently dumb, it’s just that they grow up in a world where character and intelligence don’t matter much.
Again, obviously there’s exceptions (look at John Urschel), and it actually varies from sport to sport. For example, I’ve been listening to JRE MMA podcasts more lately, and it’s been somewhat surprising how thoughtful and interesting s lot of the top fighters are. It makes sense though, considering the glamour only comes at the very top of those sports. There’s not 100,000 people watching their first amateur fights, and it’s an absolute grind to the top. They often also get their ass kicked along the way, as opposed to just always being the best. As a result these guys tend to develop personalities along the way.
I have always thought it bizarre that a human who focuses solely on their looks is considered vain and shallow, but one whose life is focused on playing a sport is considered dedicated. It's not as is pro athletes were distinguished by their elevated moral qualities.
Wait, what? Leaving aside whether someone focused on their looks is vain, I'm not how those things are similar in any way.
They’re not lol. Pro athletes are some of the most dedicated people on earth.
If some female were in fact as dedicated to her looks as a pro athlete is to their chosen sport, would we stop calling her vain? I doubt it. She'd still be vain and looks-obsessed, if anything more so.
For that matter, having met enough athletes and models, I'm not at all convinced that they are so different.
This is the worst set of takes I've heard in 2023.
I disagree that looks and sports are the same, and athletes are INSANELY dedicated. Honestly that’s the unquestionable positive role model attribute that they have. The amount of work they put into their sport to get to the top level generally goes beyond the level that most “regular people” ever put into anything. The margin of error and level of competition is so slim, and you constantly hear about guys not making it because of their lack of focus. It’s literally the most important thing outside of natural ability.
I am not arguing whether looks-obsessed people are more or less dedicated to their obsession than athletes, because that's not my point.
Both are focused on externals, but one is judged differently than the other.
Yes. They're judged differently because one of them takes more dedication.
I'm not convinced that's true, not to mention that there are plenty of successful athletes that shut down clubs, but still perform on game day. Nobody judges them the less, just as nobody lionizes math prodigies who dedicate their waking hours and a substantial portion of their dreamtime to whatever it is that math prodigies obsess over.
For that matter, if some chick were in fact that dedicated to her looks, would we stop calling her vain?
I think you've got your orders of magnitude wrong there. There's no amount of dedication to looks that would match the dedication required of a professional athlete. Managing your looks just isn't as proportionally difficult. It doesn't have as narrow a margin for error.
But I will concede the math point. It's terrible how little our culture values that. There's a good point to be made there. But comparing professional athletics to mere vanity is absurd.
Sports focus on important values such as teamwork, leadership, courage, self sacrafice, respect for opponents and teammates, sportsmanship, overcoming adversity, etc.
If you focus on your looks but never make it as a pro model you’ve probably wasted your time. If you focus on sports and never make it pro, odds are it was still one of the most important things you’ve ever done. No one who played sports thinks it was a waste of time.
Again, I'm unaware that pro athletes were so well-known for their moral qualities. Does leadership, etc. apply to Olympic sprinters?
As far as I can tell, most failed models marry some rich dude.
There are moral qualities in sports that apply across the board, therefore all people who play sports will benefit from these moral benefits. Pro athletes make up 0.0001% of people who ever play sports, and the thing about them is that they never have to apply anything outside of their sport because it’s just not relevant given how good they are. But this does not at all mean there are no moral qualities to sports, there absolutely are.
Yes, individual and team sports have different qualities. Both teach valuable lessons to the people who do them.
I have no idea what most failed models do, it’s honesty just such a ridiculous comparison.
The “shut up and dribble” response is often quite reasonable, and can be extended to some extent to other talents: actors, singers, dancers. That is really a critique of celebrity and our obsession with it.
I agree. 7 foot 22 year olds who have had thousand of people watching them since they were 14 are now expected to have developed opinions on climate change or whatever. It’s really ridiculous and 100% a product of our obsession with celebrity and social medias magnification of that.
I think elite athletes are generally more intelligent than they’re given credit for but they’ve spent their entire lives focusing only on one thing. Playing any sport at an elite level is an incredibly complicated endeavor mentally.
In my experience, certain types of athletic endeavor, for instance, American football, do require a specific kind of intelligence, although a type of intelligence very different from book smarts. Theoreticians of combat call this type of intelligence "situational awareness". Basically it's the ability to instantly size up and react to unfolding events, and at the same time, to predict and control how they will play out.
This sort of intelligence is also seen in beat cops, feral cats and jazz musicians. As noted previously, this has little to do with book smarts, and may in fact correlate negatively with book smarts or cognitive intelligence. You don't need or want an NFL cornerback who is thinking about the design of the Space Shuttle as he waits for the snap. At the same time, the Oakland Raiders had a track record of drafting prospects with phenomenal raw athletic talent, but poor football skills. The logic behind this was that football smarts could be coached, but sub 4.4 speed could not. This made seeming sense, but it rarely worked in practice. The result was a football player who looked like Tarzan, played like Jane.
Other types of athletic competition, such as sprinting or figure skating, probably don't require so much smarts of any kind.
I don’t know, I kind of buy the NBIU thing. NFL athletes play at an extremely high level all season, and need to get to an even higher level in the playoffs, so any bit of psychological motivation to get their can help. Having a bit of a chip on your shoulder can certainly help with focus, especially during an NFL playoff run where there are plenty of distractions (media etc). I’m not going to pretend I understand the psychology or professional athletes, but the difficulties of maintaining focus at while performing at a high level (and pushing yourself to that extra level of performance) seems to be an issue on most fields.
Same reason players coaches tend to not trash talk other teams - trash talk will end up being used as motivation for the opposing team. It may be all BS, but it doesn’t matter if it helps someone perform even better.
Also, violent sports like football might benefit from some sort of anger-based motivation.
I think the respect narrative is a ubiquitous thing in the history of sports perpetrated by the top sports writers and talking heads mostly on radio, but now on podcasts and streaming too, and infested into and repeated by sports fans. Winning games and championships is the only way to change a legacy narrative of suckiness. But I have no problem with this cycle and how it motivates athletes to reach deeper in energy and effort.
Everything is team sports now.
Democrats and their MSM clones have adopted the same model negative branding Republicans. And it works. Republicans, even though powered by resentment from their fans, are less effective because they don’t have the same media influence and reach given the Democrat favoring government abuses of power in tech and social media to silence conservative voices. But try they do. Democrats suck is the message that repeats in their heads (I think there is truth to this myself). And hearing that motivates Democrats to vote party line out of resentment so they can suck more.
At least in professional sports there are rules, and reasonable consistent rules enforcement, to ensure fair competitive play. Not so in politics today where the rules are exploited, abused and ignored for political team advantage.
I do think that lack of respect motivating a team to perform is unique to football where raw energy and extra effort can return better results on plays. It does not work for say NBA play where talent and teamwork matters more.
The worst in playing that card were the Georgia Bulldogs. Preseason #1 team, never lost the ranking, and did not lose a game. Players after the title game saying that people thought they were going 7-5. Like literally nobody thought that. Not one person.
They also had a 25 year old playing QB
It's not as fun if no team or athlete ever "defied their critics," even if nobody ever defined, you know, who those critics actually were...
...or if they even existed. This mentality has seeped into college football dynasties over the last decade. After this year's College Football Playoff Championship, some (not all) of Georgia's players (who were celebrating a 65-7 drubbing of TCU), went on camera claiming they "defied the critics" who predicted they'd only win five or six games. The problem is that nobody ever said this or anything like it. Clemson has been guilty of this, too. During their CFB Playoff runs, Dabo Swinney mockingly used the "little ol' Clemson" moniker to prove to everyone that they actually were good enough to win titles against teams like Alabama, and while they may not have been as dominant a team as Georgia has been the past two years, nobody ever seriously doubted they were title contenders. And speaking of Alabama, at least to Nick Saban's credit (which pains me to admit), he made the argument this past season that his team would've been the betting favorite among the four playoff teams. But he's also been guilty in the past (or members of his staff, anyway) of letting his players believe they were serious underdogs, and that members of the "national media" didn't believe in them, which is utter nonsense in the Nick Saban era of Alabama football.
It's a bit different than the NFL example you gave, but it's in the same neighborhood re: incentive. Georgia had every incentive to become one of the very few teams in CFB to ever win back-to-back titles. A CFB Playoff trophy is certainly *enough* incentive on its own, but to accomplish consecutive title campaigns is a next-level achievement. They did that, and frankly they made it look rather effortless at times. I don't know why we can't have teams and athletes just be...really good at the one thing they've been recruited or paid (or both!) to do instead of manufacturing adversity where there is little or none to be found.