Sports Donald Thomas Summary

Every elite athlete makes it look easy. Splashing through the water or striding gracefully down the track making it look effortless. Some people assume they are “naturals,” that their perfect DNA sequence is what has brought them to this level. Others argue that hard work and drive is what has made the difference, separating the elite from the average. These thoughts are the ones that give rise to the age-old nature vs. nurture debate. Countless hours of studies and research has concluded: it’s both. High performance sports consultant Ross Tucker puts it this way, “The science of success is about the coming together of dozens, perhaps hundreds of factors” (1). The relationship of such factors, including genetics, types and lengths of

The author only looked at two athletes in one sport to make his argument which could mean that in other sports the same kind of genetics beats practice would not work.

What many people fail to see in an athlete is the amount of talent in them, the commitment they have, the intense training they go through, and the competitive attitude they posses. The physical challenges they face and endure is astonishing. An average person works eight hours a day behind a desk with his computer. Imagine working the same number of hours everyday while training your abilities, maintaining your physical form, and sharpening your skills (Anonymous par. 4). That is what a professional athlete endures. Athletes face short career lengths. They also face a lot of competitiveness; therefore, an athlete is at the top of his game when he is still young. Professional athletes also face the risk of career ending injuries when they are fighting to win a game and be the best they can. Combining all those problems they face, the average career length of an athlete is five years (Keown par. 2). Not only do these athletes need to stay in shape, but they also have to perform well. But all the hard works leads to health issues such as lack of sleep, fatigue, and continuous tension (Wilson par.3). If they are not able to put up to the

They want to find out the results of two group of students. Sports are just more than a physical activity as shown in the results of the study. Researchers in China claims that, “Professional badminton players, when shown video clips of a match, could predict with uncanny accuracy where the shuttlecock would land. While watching the videos, they also displayed considerably more electrical activity in brain areas associated with attention and memory than recreational players did”. The point of this quote is that by watching old videos the players were able to identificated what they need or what they have to do in order to win or improve their games. It is because they would analyze the situation better so they can make any move that they need in order to win or improve their

The field shows how much more athletic Finny is than Gene which makes Gene jealous. Finny makes a game called blitzball and excels at the game and this makes Gene somewhat jealous. Gene notices how much better Finny is at sports than everyone else, and says,”Right From the start, it was clear that no one had ever been better adapted to a sport than Finny was to blitzball. (Knowles, page 40)” This brings a jealousy to Gene and he wants to be great at something that Finny is not so good at, so he begins to really focus on school. The field is important because it changes the relationship of Finny and Gene. Now Gene sees their friendship as a competition and thinks every little thing Finny does, is another one of his, “tricks”. Another example that shows Gene’s thinking is on spark notes. “Thus, Gene initially asserts that Finny resents him for his academic success. (Spark notes)” This statements made on spark notes shows how Gene always saw there friendship as a competition which all began from a game in a

He sees the validity of this claim, however, declares that this only gives limited knowledge, in that there is much more to this. There are many other factors factoring into athletic performance, not simply genetics. With this, he shows how these athletes followed the 10,000-hour rule, demonstrating that deliberate practice was needed to perform as well as they did. These athletes dedicated large amounts of training and dedication in order to reach the success they did. This success was not simply achieved due to their genetics, it was rather nurtured through their practice. While Gladwell believes in the idea that blacks are generally better athletes than whites, he also believes that hard work is the most important thing for someone who wants to be good at a sport. His theory is that hard work and drive are more important than someone’s race when it comes to being good at a sport, in that athletic ability does not always come down to physical ability. There is no clear explanation of why and if certain races perform better than others. Ultimately, Gladwell believes there is more than one factor that contributes to

After reading The Sports Gene and Outliers, it is determined that people become “talented” with practice and there is no such thing as innate “talent”. In Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, in chapter 2 it is said, “...10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert-in anything.” This supports the idea that people become “talented” with practice. The quote supports the claim because if it is being said that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything, it can be assumed that people do not have innate “talent”, but rather have a level of mastery over many hours of practice. It could be said on the opposite side of the argument that if it takes 10,000 hours to master anything, “ Why is there

In the excerpt “The Sports Gene” by David Epstein, the author expresses how an athlete can become a world champion, even after training for only eight months. Due to his overly sized achilles tendon, Donald Thomas was able to achieve world records after practicing for only a short amount of time. Thomas’s competitor, Stefan Holm had been training and competing for over 20 years. Holm’s had been consistently practicing and striving to become the world's highest high-jumper with hard work and determination. “But the tendons are one puzzle piece that helps explain how two athletes could arrive at essentially the same place, one after a twenty-year love affair with his craft, and the other with less than a year of serious practice.”

David Epstein the author of "The Sports Gene"

R/s about one week ago, Thomas was admitted to Palmetto Low Country Behavioral Health Center. R/s Thomas has primary custody of Megan (13). R/s Thomas has history of drug abuse. R/s Thomas doesn’t have a place to stay.

Thomas Nast, 1840-1902, was a political cartoonist who is known by some historians as “the father of modern political American political cartooning” (Simpson, ANBO). This is due in part because Nast was the person who created the donkey symbol to represent the Democratic Party and elephant symbol to represent the Republican Party. Another reason why Nast earned this title and therefore should be studied is that he changed the way cartoonists delivered their context. Before the Civil War cartoonist relied on dialogue rather than images to get the message across, however; Nast used the picture to convey the message of his cartoons (Simpson, ANBO). Since his cartoons did not need words to convey the message he was able to reach the illiterate

In 1833, a wild, imposing man named Thomas Sutpen comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, with a group of slaves and a French architect in tow. He buys a hundred square miles of land from an Indian tribe, raises a manor house, plants cotton, and marries the daughter of a local merchant, and within a few years is entrenched among the local aristocracy. Sutpen has a son and a daughter, Henry and Judith, who grow up in a life of uncultivated ease in the northern Mississippi countryside. Henry goes to college at the University of Mississippi in 1859, and meets a sophisticated fellow student named Charles Bon, whom he befriends and brings home for Christmas. Charles meets Judith, and over time, an engagement between them is assumed. But Sutpen realizes

Greg Thomas, a 57-year-old man from Minnesota, was avidly searching for a miracle after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Thomas was given only months to live after doctors determined he had stage four cancer in his head and neck. Doctors even went as far as to tell his family to start planning his funeral. Even though he didn't have much strength, Thomas liked to deal with the stress of his illness by walking his dog.

When analyzing Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright’s protagonist in the novel Native Son, one must take into consideration the development of his characterization. Being a poor twenty-year-old Black man in the south side of Chicago living with his family in a cramped one- bedroom apartment in the 1930’s, the odds of him prospering in life were not in his favor. Filled with oppression, violence, and tragedy, Bigger Thomas’ life was doomed from the moment he was born. Through the novel, Bigger divulges his own dreams to provide for his family and to be anything but a “nobody.” Although Bigger struggled to fight through obstacles to pursue his dreams for the future, his chase for a better life came to an abrupt

What makes champions in sport? At the end of the day, it is the moment when one stands at the top of the podium, holding up their well-deserved medals and trophies that all elite athletes strive for. Thus, experts have studied this question extensively to see which programs, or by what means, are elite athletes developed to achieve this goal. One of the many aspects to athlete development is the controversial topic of deliberate practice versus deliberate play. Deliberate practice can be defined as “any training activity (a) undertaken with the specific purpose of increasing performance, (b) requiring cognitive and/or physical effort, and (c) relevant to promoting positive skill development” (Cote et al., 2007, p. 185) On the