Baseball, it is thought, doesn’t attract athletes from poorer backgrounds into college programs because it isn’t a popular TV sport on an amateur level and can’t offer full scholarships to very many players. College basketball and football make tons of TV loot and can provide full scholarships, so conventional wisdom says children of poverty with great athletic skill gravitate to them. Except maybe poverty is too much of an impediment for all but a few outliers. From Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in the New York Times:
“AS the N.B.A. season gets under way, there is no doubt that the league’s best player is 6-foot-8 LeBron James, of the Miami Heat. Mr. James was born poor to a 16-year-old single mother in Akron, Ohio. The conventional wisdom is that his background is typical for an N.B.A. player. A majority of Americans, Google consumer survey data show, think that the N.B.A. is composed mostly of men like Mr. James. But it isn’t.
I recently calculated the probability of reaching the N.B.A., by race, in every county in the United States. I got data on births from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; data on basketball players from basketball-reference.com; and per capita income from the census. The results? Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men. Is this driven by sons of N.B.A. players like the Warriors’ brilliant Stephen Curry? Nope. Take them out and the result is similar.”