Yesterday an extremely large number of Americans watched the biggest football event of the year: the Super Bowl XLV. This annual game gets a great many people involved in various ways. Whether a person watches as an active participant - yelling, cheering, commenting to the athletes through the television screen - or merely put up with the game in between the stream of million-dollar commercials, the evening of the Super Bowl is typically a night to eat food and gather with friends with the television blaring.
As big of an event as it is however, is it really logical that each player gets paid a million dollars (or some such amount) to play? For me personally, I know that I chose to participate in sports in high school either because I enjoyed the results of physical activity or simply because I liked the feeling of being a part of a team. In short, there was something fun about running or skiing or whatever it may be, which drew me to participating in the sport. Now I know that things are a little different on a professional level. However, I would assume that the majority of the players who have made a career of being a professional athlete got to that point because, as a child, they enjoyed the sport to which they have now dedicated their lives. So is it unreasonable of me to have the opinion that professional athletes (like football stars in this case) are being paid an incredible salary to have fun playing a game that they love?
Forgive me if my outlook is naive, I will readily admit that I know very little about football. I understand that training and living a football lifestyle may be a taxing job, albeit a very different and specific line of work. And since football is the player's life, it most certainly deserves to be a paid position - even a well-paid position! It just seems a bit unfair to have the role of quarterback be a million-dollar position when people who have jobs that require more knowledge and a wider range of skill are paid significantly less.
Granted, many people are sports fanatics and know every score of every game their particular team has played, I would not list professional athlete as a particularly useful occupation. It certainly provides some level of entertainment...at least for as long as the season lasts, but a game does not typically work to better the community of help advance and change the world in which we live. I would say that a doctor or teacher would have a more personal and lasting effect on the lives with which they interact and work to change for the better.
I have one final thought to support my opinion. As a dancer and member of a family that shows a relatively low interest in professional sports (with the slight exception of horse racing), I have grown up with the concept that "if dance were any easier, it would be football." And since dance rarely gets as much attention as an event such as the Super Bowl, I conclude that professional athletes, specifically football players, are indeed overpaid.
You do a remarkable job with transition work from sentence to sentence so that we can easily follow the twists and turns of your discussion. This is a subtle yet highly important skill to have as a writer. Your statement that "a game does not typically work to better the community or help advance and change the world in which we live" is important, as here you begin to establish the criteria for what you believe people should be paid. Do we, then, overvalue the kind of entertainment and representations that athletes provide? How do we place a value on the kinds of work that is done? For instance, janitors are incredibly valuable to society and do, indeed, better the community, but they don't get paid very much at all.
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