Why Are Athletes Overpaid

“Jimmy Connors plays two tennis matches and winds up with $850,000, and Muhammad Ali fights one bout and winds up with five million bucks. Me, I play one-hundred and ninety games, and I'm overpaid!” - Johnny Bench. In 1975, Johnny Bench expressed how he felt as a professional baseball player and how he deserved the money he earned. Today, many professional athletes get paid on an average 5.15 million dollars a year. Some people think that these numbers are too high, but I don’t. In the Scope article “Are Athletes Overpaid?”, the author states, “Athletes do deserve to make a decent living. They inspire us, entertain us, and they work hard.” Professional basketball players should be paid at a higher rate than other professions, proving that

In the article “Are Athletes Overpaid?”, it states “When athletes are at their greatest, they dominate the game. Dunks, shots, alley oops, they can do it all.” This demonstrates that these types of basketball skills are extremely difficult to perform and the players should be rewarded for that. Additionally, many NBA players strive to break records. For example, in Mackenzie Carro’s article, “You Can’t Put a Price on Talent” she states, “LeBron James makes slam dunks look as easy as hopscotch. He’s broken the records of all-time greats like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. He is a living legend.” If a player is considered a living legend, he should be paid for his talent. Also, being a professional athlete is not easy. It takes many hours in the gym everyday just to become strong enough to run up and down a court for 48 minutes. In the article, “A Professional Athlete’s Fitness Regime: An Insider’s Guide,” the author describes training for professional athletes to be brutal. “One word that describes it best is BRUTAL. You have to be insane and neurologically damaged in your head to undergo some of the training regimes top level athletes put themselves through, day after day, week after week for an entire year. It’s not normal but it’s the price you pay to be the best.” This supports the idea that NBA players deserve the salary they receive due to the

According to NBA.com, it states, “On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain set the NBA single-game scoring record by tallying 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors in a 169-147 victory over the New York Knicks.” In a basketball game, there are 4 quarters with 12 minutes in each quarter. Therefore, for one man to score 100 points in 48 minutes proves the level of ability needed to play the game at the professional level. Furthermore, in an article published by the US National Library of Medicine, through studies it was determined “…that professional athletes as a group have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning unpredictable, complex dynamic visual scenes that are void of any specific context. It is clear from these results that these remarkable mental processing and learning abilities should be acknowledged as critical elements for world-class performance in sport and potentially elite performance abilities in other dynamic contexts.” This suggests even professional medical researchers believe that professional athletes who are world class performers should be recognized for their abilities. What better way to be recognized than to be