SPORT Essay -- essays research papers

Professional Athletes Salaries: Are they paid too much? What should athletes deserve to be paid? Many players have risen to stardom by becoming a professional athlete. Athletes have come from many different backgrounds; some from wealthy and some from poverty raised backgrounds. Salaries are continuing to rise, and money doesn’t seem to be an issue. Athletes are getting what they want from the owners by negotiating through their agents. Athletes’ salaries aren’t just from their owners, but they come from other sources also. Athletes get paid an enormously high salary for the work they do. Really all they do is entertain us. We should consider the value of their work and pay them accordingly. They do not deserve the extreme amount they get paid and something should be done about it. Wouldn't it be great to make twenty million dollars a year and an additional ninety million dollars in endorsements simply to play a game that you are supposed to love to play? Lebron James, who has no college degree and hasn’t worked a day in his life, along with many other professional athletes thinks so. Lebron makes close to 100 million a year and probably will soon make much more. Yes, he is one of the best basketball players in the world, but paying somebody that much money for a game is ridiculous. All he had to do was just put a little round ball in a hoop. He didn’t save nobody’s life or make something that would benefit society. He entertained us for eighty two games and now has more money than he can spend. In today's society, one is supposed to be paid more if their job is more economically important. Doctors make more than factory workers; teachers make more than people who work at Wendy’s and so on. Still, professional athletes make more than what a teacher makes. Some professional athletes will make more money in one year than a teacher will make if he/she teaches all of their life. Is entertaining people more important than teaching them? The future of our society relies on the education of its youth and still teachers are paid less than these professional athletes. Even President Bush gets paid less than what most professional athletes are making. Here is a guy who makes decisions that affects everybody in our society everyday and we are saying entertainment is more important because we pay these athletes more. These games are supposed to be played for fun, not... ...plays a sport that they say they love is getting paid ten times as much as a doctor, police officer, or a fire fighter. Police officers and fire fighters protect our lives and save them, but they do not get close to the amount of money a player who plays professional sports. I am not just talking about the superstars in professional sports, but also about the players who never get to play and just sit on the bench. They still get hundred of thousands a dollars a year. I know to make it to the professional ranks in any sport is very difficult and these athletes train all of the time, but so do other professions. In other professions it might not be as physically demanding as sports, but they still have to train and stay on top of their game. I really find it hard to believe that in our society, we value entertainment more than almost anything else. There are people right now in this world dying because they do not have enough money to eat and we give athletes more money than they can spend because they are good at their sport. Professional athletes are extremely good at what they do, but do they really deserve millions of dollars because they can throw, kick, hit, or shoot a ball.