Why is it that some children aspire to be a professional athlete? It might be because you have a fun job, but what about the money? The average professional athlete makes over a million dollars a year. That might be why some children want to be athletes. It's really unnecessary for someone who plays a game to make that much money (Hoffman, Greenberg, 3). .
The highest paid player in American sports history, is Texas Rangers short stop Alex Rodriguez (Eichorn, 1). Alex signed a contract for 252 million dollars over ten years with the Rangers, or 22 million each year for ten years [(Weiss, 3)(Eichorn, 1)]. But some don't fathom how much 22 million dollars a year is. You"d have to win a million dollars on "Who wants to be a Millionaire" 22 times. If you had a $50,000 salary, you"d have to wait about 5,000 years to make what Alex makes in a year. You could also get lucky with the lottery (Eichorn, 2). The owners paid more for Rodriguez, than they paid for the whole ball club. Paying players that kind of money not only costs owners though, it cost fans, for ticket prices and food and drinks at the baseball field (Eichorn, 5).
Athletes don't really have a reason for making millions of dollars. Some don't know basics, like hitting the cutoff man, and running hard all the time. This also means they've lost their loyalty if they don't listen to coaches and some consider them to be "heroes". Players are disappointing too because most of the time they don't even care about the game, just about money and their contract status (Schapp, 108-110).
Some athletes and spokesmen for athletes and professional sports argue that athletes are entertainers and deserve just as much money as an actor or an actress. Acting and sports have been forms of entertainment for very long periods of time but are two very different things. Acting has mainly been defined as an art and sports defined as just a game. Performers just aren't worth $10,000 dollars for maybe 3 hours in a day, its game (Hoffman, Greenberg, 3&8).