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Are football players courageous?

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StooGrimson said:
Eh, the activities you mention may require courage (and stupidity depending on the challenge) if you've never done them before, but if you've constantly trained and developed the necessary skills to do them, I see no courage needed.
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so if teddy ginn trains for a lifetime to play WR and makes it to the pros, it takes zero courage to go over the middle with sean taylor waiting for him?

nobody is saying he deserves a medal of honor for going over the middle, but to say it requires no courage is asanine.

Otherwise, I'd love for tibor to field a punt with Chudmeat flying towards him.
 
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jwinslow said:
so if teddy ginn trains for a lifetime to play WR and makes it to the pros, it takes zero courage to go over the middle with sean taylor waiting for him?

nobody is saying he deserves a medal of honor for going over the middle, but to say it requires no courage is asanine.

Otherwise, I'd love for tibor to field a punt with Chudmeat flying towards him.
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I would use the terms 'guts' or 'balls' to describe something like that. By the strictest definition of the word 'courage', yes, it can take a degree of 'courage'. Then again a professional wrestler leaping off of a top rope onto a table has a far more likely chance of being hurt. Is that courageous? Eh, once again, I can say 'yes' by the strictest interpretation, but it's a slap in the face to people who really are brave and courageous. I happen to think that applying it to someone who is playing a game and knows he's going to take a shot cheapens the word and is an insult to those who exhibit real courage.

BTW...I've had to field punts with people coming to flatten me ( few times I was nailed pretty badly) and never thought it took any courage on my part to do my job.
 
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It's simply a continuum.

Doing nothing < Facing your average workday < Throwing the ball with a linebacker about to knock you silly < The linebacker is Hawk < Running into a burning building to save someone

I'd also say the level of courage in any task is a function of how much of a threat exists for damage or pain (physical or otherwise) and how easy it would be to avoid the situation (i.e., saving someone as you escape a burning building would not be as courageous as running back into one to do the same thing).

Now, actually labeling someone as courageous is something I would generally reserve for people like firefighters, law enforcement, or military, or those who perform some extraordinary act.
 
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Teddy Ginn going over the middle with Ed Reed partrolling - not courageous

Teddy Ginn entering a burning building to save a baby - courageous

Any person risking bodily injury to play a sport - not courageous

Any person risking bodily injury to protest for a higher cause - courageous.

You can define courage however you want, but as somebody once said about pornography, I know it when I see it.
 
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tibor75 said:
You can define courage however you want, but as somebody once said about pornography, I know it when I see it.
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Time out for a legal reference.

The most frequently quoted Supreme Court opinion on obscenity: MR. JUSTICE STEWART, concurring in Jacobellis v. Ohio.
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[SIZE=-1]JUSTICE POTTER STEWART[/SIZE]</CENTER>[FONT=Arial,Helvetica][SIZE=-1] It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476, in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts, that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. [/SIZE][/FONT]
 
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