Maybe not the rich, but at least middle class to upper middle class. College baseball is starting to resemble a country club, I'd guess it's about 90% white. The MLB is only diverse because of all the international players.

itt swighey takes over the conversation explaining everything to the simple masses.

hockey, its on ice ffs.

Boxing or mma

Lacrosse. My HS coach ran a camp in the summer that brought in D1 and D2 players of the year, a top 5 draft pick and several other "top" players. the best thing any of these dudes would brag about were free shoes.

Not leveling its gotta be whatever sport has the most people playing from like age 5 through 18 so probably its soccer

Boxing/mma/tennis might also be correct since its 1 person and like 30 are successful at a given time, but I also think there are no 5 year olds training to fight so maybe just tennis

I don't know why it would be tennis its one of the sports with the highest correlation between hours spent playing and getting good

Golf

can't believe more people aren't voting football.

All the money is at the very very top in boxing (like the top 10 guys). It also has lots of people all around the world attempting to enter the sport, like soccer does. Brain trauma for pro boxers is comparable to NFL linemen

gotta be MMA in my mind. the number of guys that actually earn good money is so small. maybe 3 guys per weight class and the oddball draw who will likely flame out soon. and you wanna talk about an accessible sport? there are training sites all over the place. even guys that wrestle are developing at least a decent foundation. if they're a crazy athlete and smart enough to learn striking they probably have a shot to make the UFC. but then that guarantees nothing really.

how many guys can stay on top for a long time? it's laughable the money some of these guys earn on the ppvs. guys on the main card who win can easily earn <50k and they fight like 3 or 4 times max per year. a how many millionaires are currently fighting MMA? 15? 25?

it's certainly not basketball or soccer. if you're good enough at either of those sports you can earn a decent living in at least dozens of countries.

****, i saw nick fazekas drop like 30 in a game when i was traveling in asia last month.

Can't imagine that soccer's the answer. Yes, there's a huge player pool, but there's also a gigantic pool of professional leagues. There's tons of countries that might have zero players earning a living in any sport other than soccer while still hundreds of professional soccer players. I voted golf since only about 300 people worldwide make a living playing it but tennis might be a better answer. Don't really know which of those has a bigger penetration worldwide.

Basketball's a reasonable answer too, as there are only 450 players in the top league (the NBA) with the larger proliferation of European and Asian leagues that pay big money, I'm not sure if it's tougher than golf or tennis.

the gladwell reference was my favorite part

lol gladwell

After some googling around, looks like tennis has a much higher number of participants worldwide than golf. Pretty sure that either golf or cricket is the definitive answer here.