Steve,

You write, “professional athletes are exactly the same as everyone else. Some of them are intellectuals and some are not.” Well, this statement is no value unless you mean that professional athletes tend to be intellectuals at approximately the same rate as the rest of the population. And it’s exactly this assertion that I disagree with.

To make my point, let’s use an illustration. Pick any Hollywood movie or TV show that features a female lead character that’s an incredibly educated, top-flight brain surgeon, nuclear physicist, rocket scientist, molecular biologist or something-of-the sort. Now we all know that when they trot out this character, she’s going to be young and drop-dead gorgeous. Right? True, it’s not an absolute certainty. At some point a pilot show was probably produced for the Lifetime Channel that broke all the rules. But surely, if you had to bet your life on it, you’d go with the generalization.

Now one of the reasons Hollywood movies and TV shows are understood to be rather phony, is that in real life, drop-dead gorgeous females rarely become incredibly educated, top-flight brain surgeons, nuclear physicists, rocket scientists, molecular biologists or anything-of-the sort. And the reason they don’t is that such careers require awesome amounts of time, discipline and effort. Simply put, drop-dead gorgeous females have far easier, more rewarding and entirely respectable options to turn to rather than to knock themselves out in pursuit of heavily academic careers. Moreover, if they do attempt such challenging careers, they’ll be endlessly set upon by hordes of young men, working hard to distract them from their studies. Few girls could ever hope to overcome such interference.

So we all accept this, right? And in effect, the same line of reasoning goes for professional athletes. Sure, there are exceptions. But the fact is, most top-flight athletes have had to focus most of their energies on their sporting disciplines. This leaves them little time for heavy doses of intellectual pursuit, even if they hungered for them. Moreover, why would many of them bother to pursue such matters, where their most obvious and natural gifts can’t come into play, and which might be held against them? (Computer nerds can be known not to cut jocks a lot of slack willingly.) Face it, the extremely gifted athlete rarely mixes, while growing up, with the intellectually challenging types. (Or was it different in your high school?) Then there’s the matter of ego’s. When someone has distinguished himself in sports and risen to a certain level of status, why would they then wish to pursue an intellectual field where they’d be starting out as a light-weight novice? It simply doesn’t play to form. Better to stick with what you’ve been praised for from infancy.

Are there exceptions? Sure. But in terms of the essential question (do professional athletes tend to be intellectuals at approximately the same rate as the rest of the population?), I say no.

Newspaper reporters can certainly celebrate all sorts of professional athletes as fabulous intellectuals. If the guy’s read part of some book and can sling around a phrase from it, they’re suddenly the Renaissance Man. But the rest of us don’t have to buy it.

As for me, I’m just fine with admiring professional athletes (and gorgeous females) for what they are, as opposed to trying to imagine them to be what they’re generally not.