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Comment by telchior | Hacker News Reader

By random chance I recently had a flight seated next to a coach for a young player who was in the women's Future bracket. The coach had been a Future player once too.

I've never really understood, at an emotional level, why pro sports exist. So after a while of conversation, during which he mentioned a few times how difficult life was for them, I finally felt like I could ask:

"If it's like you've described, why do it at all?"

He stared into space for a good few seconds, then responded:

"Glory."

I've wondered a few times since then whether the girl he was coaching would think that glory was enough; she had a look that, following the article, I'd describe as glassy-eyed loneliness. But maybe in a few years, she'll be the coach for someone in the next generation. For myself... I still don't really get it.

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> But maybe in a few years, she'll be the coach for someone in the next generation.

Most of these people "burn" their youth chasing the dream and don't get a non-sport education/experience. A career of a trainer is still likely more attractive than a menial unqualified job.

This seems very unlikely to me given the propensity of finance firm to hire even college athletes never mind people who got to be in the top one or 200 of their sport in the world. Anyone who is capable of pushing the work in day after day to get a good at some thing that doesn’t very well like sport is capable of putting enormous amount of work day after day to get good at something that does pay well. Most famously jocks are good at sales. Athletes are no fools. Often of the top of my head Michael Jordan has had a very successful career as an investor after the end of his sporting career. Michelle Debruin, and Irish Olympic gold medallist in swimming, went on to become a Barrister, a trial lawyer in the American parlance. The people who stay in Borsh are staying in sports because they really really love i,t not because they’re not capable of making more money in other ways.

    > Athletes are no fools

A quick search will show you the shockingly high bankruptcy rates for former pro athletes. Plus, most of them do not finish uni and have few marketable skills after their short career ends.

You can have jobs without a degree. Important and fullfilling jobs too.

Those bankruptcy statistics might be biased given how poorly paid athletes are, thus tgey might be a consequence of their past and not their present.

They aren't fools, they pursue their dreams. Less foolish than some of us.

> Those bankruptcy statistics might be biased given how poorly paid athletes are, thus tgey might be a consequence of their past and not their present.

You're generalizing quite a bit here. The other common story for those in the team sports I've heard is that a ton of them have poor financial education and got fleeced by money managers. Combo that with poor job prospects and injuries from the sport itself that you've to pay to treat...

I know someone who went through this. dreams followed. Pursued a sport through college, didn't quite make pro. afterwards life languished and didn't quite amount to much.

I think people might need to have a plan b, but honestly I don't know very many people who do. People are good at doing what defines them, not hedging.

> You can have jobs without a degree. Important and fullfilling jobs too.

For sure, I'm someone like that. But I started at 20 to get into my field. My first job was laughably badly paid, but I got a foot in the door.

These athletes usually end their career at around 35. An age where you already have a family or plan to get it soon, meaning you have financial obligations, and it's not easy to completely switch the career tracks. Many will manage to do it, but many will rather choose the safe way of staying in the sport, where they already have a resume, knowledge, customer base.

    > given how poorly paid athletes are

To be clear, in the US, when people say pro-athlete, they mostly means NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB. (Yes, tennis counts also, but leave that aside for a moment.)

I Googled for minimum contracts in those four leagues:

NBA: 1.1m USD NFL: 660k USD NHL: 750k USD MLB: 60k USD

MLB is shockingly low, but it might be explained by the farm leagues. (I don't know more details.) I doubt anyone who sees regular play in the MLB is making so little.

You're talking about maybe the top 1500 sportspeople in the country.

The rest are poorly paid.

If you play in the major league baseball you min is $740k not $60k. https://apnews.com/major-league-baseball-labor-agreement-det...

ESPN's 30-for-30 episode "Broke" is a great watch. It does seem though that newer generation athletes are a bit better educated in that matter since they're better connected online, but that might just be anecdotal.

As a contrary example there is Boris Becker

You have the 1950s approach: we hire a hard working person amd after 5 years of internship they will become great.

Most companies nowadays offer zero on the job training. You need 5 years of experience for your internship. You are supposed to make impact now.

Maybe somoene can score some sales based on looks, but come on.

You need to register your sales in SAP now, it's your problem nobody told you how (although with sales they still will, since it is a profit center).

A career of a trainer is still likely more attractive than a menial unqualified job

So its like a slow-burning pyramid scheme powered by youthful optimism?

Nothing like pyramid scheme because what sustain the “scheme” overall is public interest, generate experiences that people pay money for and companies are willing to sponsor. It’s not the new young players that input all the money in the industry.

Even in the case of very young players that are paying to play, it’s the parents money, so not exactly “youthful optimism” that powers it.

Players pay for a trainer, no?

No. Yet, if you're cynical enough everything is a pyramid scheme. And, then maybe you're able to see that the economic systems themselves are full on that unsustainable growth (if, for example, you start looking into how the 'natural resources' are exploited to be centralized in important cities/ countries yet the environmental costs are never paid by the latter and so on...)

Nobody decides to pursue their pro sports dream out of pragmatism or a career. They do it because its their calling and they don't care about the odds. They know that a fractional percentage will achieve the highest highs, and they go forth anyway.

But Roger Federer was 18 when he first won Roland Garros (French Open). Shouldn’t they quit if they are not going to be at the top?

Federer was 27 when he won his first French open. His first slam was Wimbledon which he won when he was 21. You are thinking of Nadal who won his first French open when he was 18. Also there have been players who won their first slam much later in their careers. Schiavone for example reached her first slam final and won it when she was almost 30.

I too should stop programming given I'll never be at a FAANG at this point. /s

Programming is a non-scalable career (in the Talebian sense[1]), like being a lawyer or doctor. The relationship in earnings vs success is much closer to linear, with the most successful programmers getting only about 10x (100x if we'rereally generous, but probably more like 2-4x on average) more than the least.

In contrast pro sports are a scalable career, where incomes can scale separately from effort, similar to movie stars, authors and musicians. The relationship is an exponential with the very best earning the lion share of the income of the entire industry, earning literally millions of times more than those at the bottom of the industry.

Given a certain amount of effort invested in your career so far, if you know you're middle of the road of a scalable career, and it's becoming less and less likely that you'll hit the top 1 percentile, then I would think that the likelihood that you should perhaps look to change career should be much higher than if you were middle of the road in a non scalable career.

[1] https://casnocha.com/2009/03/scalable-vs-non-scalable-career...

Starting your own company can make your skills more scalable.

The top artists like Taylor Swift have scalable careers mostly because they operate like a corporation.

It seems like programming is scalable, in that some programs get executed many orders of magnitude more than other programs.

> "If it's like you've described, why do it at all?"

> He stared into space for a good few seconds, then responded:

"Glory."

The coach was a Klingon?

I found this article about a young swimmer really interesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/02...

I know a family with a pre-teen son investing a huge amount of time in another individual sport. 4-5 hours every weeknight, putting pressure on schooling and on the family by limiting schedules and recreation. They all give a certain look when they talk about it, knowing that there is a cost to creating (potentially) an elite athlete. At least the kid himself doesn't look glass-eyed and lonely, but I do wonder how that life would compare in hindsight to regular family, time for socialising, regular holidays, etc. This is not really sport with NBA money at the end.

What motivates you, comfort?

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