bigmarc27 said:
The only sports the world could consistently compete with the US in if the US devoted it's entire resources to would be tennis and golf and that's primarily because they're based on precision just as much as athleticism.If the US wanted to dominate hockey, it could. Considering half the country has never seen an ice rink, I doubt it'll ever happen but it could. Football, baseball, and basketball are obvious. Anything else with our facilities and demographics could be dominated here as well, but we don't watch/don't care.
You should go to the rugby guys.com forum and ask why South Africa doesn't dominate football.
I think you're grossly underestimating Canada and Russia (and maybe a lot of Northern Europe) here - No reason why those two, if also dedicating their entire resources to the sport, couldn't beat the US.
I'd argue that the reason we couldn't dominate Tennis and Golf is because those are individual sports...It's a lot harder to "dominate" when all you need is 1 super-star than it is when you need a team of them. You may see a Tennis champ from some tiny country because that one person was good...you're far less likely to see a basketball team from some tiny country be dominant b/c you'd need a bunch of folks to defy the odds.
On the hockey thing, maybe but we're moderately competitive now and literally 3/4 of the population doesn't even consider playing hockey. I live in Atlanta, I'm not aware of a single ice rink in the entire state except where the Gwinnett Gladiators play. It's not even an option and I'd venture to guess its the same everywhere south of Ohio. It basically guts a huge portion of our population.
Also a large portion of athletes never consider hockey. By that I mean, hockey teams are full of scrappy, hard working guys, that skate good routes errr I mean plays. The athletic freaks that play in the NBA and NFL don't don't care about hockey at all.
First, LOL @ "skate good routes"
I get what you're saying, and I agree for a lot of sports. The OP topic of Rugby for example, is basically football. The athletic freaks in the NFL
could dominate football if that's where the money and fame was. If that was the US's sport. The skills there are running, jumping, tackling, etc. I guess I just feel like hockey has a unique skill-set. I don't see, say, a freak like Adrian Peterson translating to skates, even if he skated all his life. Further, Zedeno Chara aside, really tall , big guys aren't automatically an asset in hockey. There are sports that are built for different sized guys. Being the biggest and strongest doesn't always translate.
I don't think the US necessarily is dominant in strategy or thinking. We've got some freakishly big, freakishly strong, freakishly fast (on their feet on solid ground) guys, but I guess for sports where those attributes aren't the most important, our strategy, thinking, and coordination are probably just on-par with others.
Also, if it were just a population/numbers game, China would flat out win everything.
