things that don’t make me feel sorry for someone (looking at you Rudy Gobert)

Disclaimer: I wrote this for the sake of starting a conversation while bored. This site has been kind of dead, so I thought I would post my (highly exaggerated) opinions on this subject to hopefully get a discussion going. I can understand why these things would frustrate professional athletes, as they are very competitive people that have spent their lives working toward their goals, but my understanding/empathy for them stops short of feeling bad for them.

So apparently Rudy Gobert got quite emotional about his all star snub, which lead to a bunch of fans talking about how sorry they felt for him… blah blah blah

This got me thinking. I just don’t comprehend what drives people to feel sorry for professional athletes when things happen to them that are directly related to their jobs.

I’m not saying that Rudy is feeling sorry for himself (I think it’s more likely just frustration), but if he is…

Professional athletes are better off than 99% of the worlds population in every conceivable way. More money, better health, increased popularity, more pull with the opposite sex…

Here is a list of things that could happen to male professional athletes that don’t cause me to feel sorry for them in any way shape or form.

1. missing out on arbitrary selections to make believe teams that have limited spots. These teams are for entertainment purposes only, when you do less entertaining than other players, you don’t get selected. You make millions of dollars to play a game, you don’t deserve anything more than the ludicrous amounts of recognition you already get for being able to do something that doesn’t fill an essential role in society.

2. Getting traded to a team in a location that you don’t like. Again, millions of dollars to play a game. This is what you signed up for.

3. Injuries that happen in the course of playing the game that you get paid crazy amounts of money to play, with one caveat: the injury is not life altering, and could happen to a regular Joe that doesn’t get paid millions to play a game.

Example A: I feel bad for Alex Smith, because that injury very nearly cost him his leg, and isn’t something that would happen to anybody.

Example B: I don’t feel bad for Derrick Rose, because he has had knee injuries. Plenty of regular people get similar injuries all the time, and they all deal with it. Regular Joe gets hurt like that playing ball with his buddies, or just walking down the street, he could lose his job depending on where he works and what his responsibilities are. Professional athletes, for the most part, continue to get paid millions of dollars even when they AREN’T playing the game they are getting paid to play. In essense, they get paid to rehab injuries.

4. Getting screwed out of a big opportunity (like playing in the super bowl) because of a bad call or some such thing. I would include in this one losing a hard fought meaningful game (like a championship) whether the refs impacted the result or not. Again, loads of money, playing a game, so on and so forth.

5. Not getting a chance to prove yourself, riding the pine… These guys have it the easiest of all. They get paid to NOT play a game. They may get paid less, but it’s still a ton of money, usually just because you might some day contribute. I wish I could get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions of dollars a year for the successful book I might some day write (I won’t really, but they think I will so…).

Am I missing anything? Am I totally off base here?