Last week, Wired’s Frontal Cortex blog featured an enlightening article that puts an interesting, in their words, “addendum on the 10,000 rule,” which famously suggests that virtually anyone can achieve success in any field if he or she just practices the task for 10,000 hours. (This means practicing 20 hours a week for 10 years and is detailed in Malcolm Gladwell’s stellar book Outliers.)
This new wrinkle suggests that it’s not just time but location that matters — at least when we’re talking about sports. I can’t summarize the whole concept better than the author did, so just click through and read the piece, but the general premise is that kids from more rural areas are more likely to become professional athletes despite the fact that 52% of Americans live in cities of 500,000 people or more.
Interesting stuff. (h/t Cools)
And to the basketball junkie in me, the most interesting stuff is how much more urban the NBA is than the other major team sports. Obviously, we already knew this. But basketball has been called “the city game” so many times that it has just become cliché at this point. And like people calling baseball “the national pastime” even though most people prefer things like watching football, eating bacon and GTLing, calling basketball “the city game” just starts to seem like something to say rather than a fact-based statement.
But the percentages (which I’m sure aren’t new … but they are new to me so humor me) are staggering:
The percent of professional athletes who came from cities of fewer than a half million people was far higher than expected. While approximately 52 percent of the United States population resides in metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people, such cities only produce 13% of the players in the NHL, 29% of the players in the NBA, 15% of the players in MLB, and 13% of players in the PGA.*
I’m not going to speculate on all the many socioeconomic, cultural and other reasons for this. But it is quite a chasm.
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