The Best At What They Do

Another factor is immediate feedback. With basketball when you shoot the ball, within a few seconds you know whether it’s gone in. You can shoot all night long, by yourself in the court. Not so with golf (someone has to go up a few hundred yards to let you know roughly where the ball landed).

“There is a second effect on endogenous acquisition of skills. Competition is less intense and they have less incentive to acquire skills in order to be competitive.”

Could go the other way.

Model 1: Let p_i = Prob (individual i makes the bigtime | effort) and q(p_i) = Prob(effort | p_i). Presumably it holds that q(p_i) is an increasing function of p_i. [I’m treating effort as binary in order to make this simple]. Let’s say the sport with the “highest skill level” is the one with the most people engaging in effort to try to make the bigtime, i.e., the largest effective pool of aspiring professionals. So the skill level of a sport is p_i * q(p_i) integrated over the entire population of individuals i.

We agree that basketball has the most dispersed distribution of p_i, and table tennis / soccer / golf / chess have less dispersed distributions of p_i. So is p_i * q(p_i) increasing or decreasing? Depends on the convexity or concavity of p_i * q(p_i) as a function of p_i, I think. Convex means basketball has more total effort, concave means basketball has less total effort. Like I said, could go either way.

Model 2: Total effort expended by people to win a contest is equal to total gains from winning. [True in a model with enough homogeneity across people, arguably false in basketball world if enough people have sufficient inherent comparative advantage from being tall and athletic. But with enough tall athletic people it’s approximately true, even if we happen to be restricting to .1% of the population]. So to find the most competitive sport, just add up the dollar value of benefits (including prestige, etc) across all players. Now basketball looks a lot more competitive than chess or table tennis, at least.

In both golf and tennis player height is a significant advantage.

In golf, a taller player has a larger swing path and can generate much higher club head speeds. Think of two players, on 6′ and the other 5’6″. In order to get the same diameter swing path the shorter player has to use a longer club, but longer clubs are harder to control.

Tennis is similar in that taller players, with longer arms, generate more force with equal swing speed then shorter players do. However, height is also an advantage as it allows for more reach.

I would add any shooting sport to your list, like skeet shooting, as there are very few obvious natural advantages. Some may have better innate hand eye coordination, but that will not become obvious until after they have competed for a while.

I would also add baseball to the list, at least the non-pitching positions. Height may be an advantage as a power hitter, but not all successful hitters are power hitters.

Lastly, I would add skiing/snowboarding to the list. Weight has no affect on how quickly things go down hill, it’s all skill.

Totally agree with your statistical argument. However, doesn’t the argument limit the sports in contention then necessarily only to mass sports? There are so many not “mass sports” whose practitioners are so amazingly good in what they are doing compared to advanced hobby sportsmen which would be excluded from contention just by the fact that so little people pursue them.
For instance, take the aforementioned snooker, I played regularly for about 5 years 3 times a week. Still, the worst player who won at least a single match in the qualification round of a ranking tournament this year would beat me strikingly if he were severely drunken and had covered eyes. However, although snooker does not require (necessarily) successful players to be particularly tall, etc. it’s just a sport pursued by so little people. And those people are not snooker players because they are potentially the best in the world, they are the best out of the tiny subset to which snooker was accessible at early childhood.
Also, you’re listing golf. In my opinion the financial entry barrier (particularly outside the US) is so high that, again, it’s not a contender.
Although I agree totally with the reasoning about the NBA, reiterating that reasoning leads to exclusively two sports, soccer and table tennis, the second of which suffers from a major geographical bias.

How might I blame Obama for this?

Where does hockey rank? Tried going skating with my wife last night and I could barely stand up let alone skate. I’m assuming it must be a huge barrier to playing the sport well. Atleast I’d think when compared to other sports where everyone can atleast perform the most basis functions like walking or running.

“Tried going skating with my wife last night and I could barely stand up let alone skate. I’m assuming it must be a huge barrier to playing the sport well. Atleast I’d think when compared to other sports where everyone can atleast perform the most basis functions like walking or running.”

It takes a lot of dedication and a diverse array of skills to become a good hockey player. Are nuclear scientists shitty at their jobs because they’re drawn from such a select, elite subset of the population? You must have the total package to be a competitive pro in hockey. The worst goon in the NHL, with the fewest points, could SCHOOL any rec league.

1. Boxer
2. NFL Cornerback
3. Magician

Runners in the most glamorous competitions (100 m dash, marathons) should be here. Those competitions draw from an enormous pool of possible talent, and provide relatively lucrative and prestige rewards to attract the best runners.

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