WHERE DOES TALENT COME FROM?
It’s a big question, and one way to approach it is to look at the places where talent seems to be located — in other words, to sketch a map. In this case, the map would show the birthplaces of the 50 top men and women in a handful of professional sports, each sport marked by its own color. The resulting image — what could be called a talent map — emerges looking like abstract art: vast empty regions interspersed with well-defined bursts of intense color, sort of like a Matisse painting.
Canada, for instance, is predictably cluttered with NHL Hockey players, but significant concentrations also pop up in Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic.
Baseball stars are generously sprinkled across the southern United States but the postage-stamp-size Dominican Republic isn’t far behind.
In women’s tennis, we see dispersal around Europe and the United States, then a dazzling, concentrated burst in Moscow.
A quick analysis of this talent map reveals some splashy numbers: for instance, the average woman in South Korea is more than six times as likely to be a professional golfer as an American woman.
Currently in the Rolex women’s world golf rankings, South Koreans hold 4 of the top 10 spots, 10 of the top 25 spots and 36 of the top 100 spots. Only 16 Americans are ranked in the top 100.
And how is it that Jamaica, a poor, underdeveloped nation of 2.8 million people — one-hundredth the size of the United States — has somehow managed to produce the fastest humans alive?
What force is causing those from certain far-off places to become, competitively speaking, superior?
