07-22-2018, 08:33 AM
(07-21-2018, 11:05 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The risky exploits of Generation X on skateboards and other extreme sports and stunts, which I could witness first hand being in California, went far beyond what boomers attempted. Quite impressive and talented.
But the reflexes and physical strength are beginning to slow. There just aren't many professional athletes (golfers perhaps excepted, but that is more a question of staying fit -- think of Tiger Woods) than reflexes, speed, or power.
What applies to baseball players (peak performance is usually in the late 20s, with a drop-off typically around 29 or 30) so that the mediocre ones at their peak are typically gone by age 32, the simply good by 35, with only the stars and superstars staying in the game as players past about 35) applies even more to football players and about as well to basketball and hockey players. Athleticism, the near-preserve of GIs in the 1930s and early 1940s, became nearly a Silent preserve from about 1950 to about 1965, a Boom preserve from about 1970 to 1985, an X preserve from about 1990 to about 2005. To be sure, there might be late-wave members of a generation who force their personality upon the sport (Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, Rogers Hornsby, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Warren Spahn, Pete Rose, Rickey Henderson, Cal Ripken Jr.) after their generation is largely spent in that sport just as there are early members of the generation who compel attention (Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Whitey Ford, Reggie Jackson, Mark McGwire, Justin Verlander) at the start of their generations' sojourns in their sport. I speak of baseball because I know of more of the personalities.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.