You can clearly see this "upper limit" on sports: talentless people work and train really hard to compete at elite level.
You can see them sweating, cringing and showing all kinds of emotion. Fans love these players, they identify them as another hard-working "blue collar" guy like them.
Then along comes a guy like Josh Hamilton, a guy so incredibly talented everything looks effortless. He seems to trot when he is running full blast, he seems to flip the bat but hits a homerun, looks like he just lobbed the baseball from the outfield but it's a perfect 90mph strike to a base getting the runner out.
A sport particularly brutal in this sense is Tennis: 10k hrs of practice might get you to the top 100, but from there everybody is so incredibly talented it's discouraging. You might spend 10k hours just perfecting your one-hand backhand, then, when you think you got it, along comes Sampras or Federer hitting it 10 times harder without flinching.
You can see them sweating, cringing and showing all kinds of emotion. Fans love these players, they identify them as another hard-working "blue collar" guy like them.
Then along comes a guy like Josh Hamilton, a guy so incredibly talented everything looks effortless. He seems to trot when he is running full blast, he seems to flip the bat but hits a homerun, looks like he just lobbed the baseball from the outfield but it's a perfect 90mph strike to a base getting the runner out.
A sport particularly brutal in this sense is Tennis: 10k hrs of practice might get you to the top 100, but from there everybody is so incredibly talented it's discouraging. You might spend 10k hours just perfecting your one-hand backhand, then, when you think you got it, along comes Sampras or Federer hitting it 10 times harder without flinching.