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Old 08-08-2007, 10:55 PM
PowerRangers PowerRangers is offline
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Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 71
Default Re: Hard to quantify sports question

You can easily separate natural talent/abilities and skill that is gained through experience.

Let me introduce an example that has not been used before here, but is relevant to "sports."

Bowling. Bowling has always been the "sport" for me that I think is ridiculous to be considered a sport. You are competing against an opponent, and yet, you're not. You're playing an isolated game that is being compared to another isolated game. In golf, this is the case, but, the conditions, the shots, the courses vary. In bowling, there is very minor variation from lane to lane (not enough, in my in opinion to influence the outcome), such that the bowler should be able to compensate for the differences.

If you could train yourself to make the same exact motion on every single 1st roll (never needing to pick up a split or a spare at all), you'd be the world's greatest bowler-just roll a strike everytime, right? Is this from practice or innate skill? Clearly someone who practices this same motion 4 hours a day is going to be a great bowler. But who has the time? Professional bowlers do...

I am suggesting that you can take a random person who has never bowled in his or her life (at least 18 years old), have them trained and bowl 8 hours a day for 1 year, and turn them into a professional bowler (they can consistently bowl >260).

Anyway, that example was slightly tangential, but the point is that "sports" like fishing, golf, bowling, darts, poker are not sports require a "natural talent or ability," but rather can be perfected with proper training and practice on any person of normal intelligence and athletic prowess (to mean we aren't training a crippled wheel-chair bound man to hit a golf ball, as that becomes a different sport).
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