A few years after my football career ended, I found myself playing linebacker in a recreational flag football game in Long Island’s Eisenhower Park. This is rarely ever a good idea.

Now, if you’ve ever played flag football on Long Island – or anywhere else, for that matter – you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about here. For some guys, most of whom have never played a down of football that counted, Sunday morning flag games are their Super Bowl. They play dirty, they talk way too much shit, and the obnoxiousness factor is so far over the top that most games eventually devolve into absurd exercises in Al Bundy-ism.

In one game, the opposing team’s offense ran some kind of iso series where their “fullback” kept coming through the line and cut blocking me. Yes, you read that right: I had a fullback taking dives at my knees in a Sunday morning flag football game. I repeatedly said something to the guy, but he wouldn’t stop doing this. I eventually had to take matters into my own hands.

About midway through the game, the guy who’d been cutting me had the ball, and I had a free shot at him. I took it, nailing him with a textbook – albeit a little high – decleater. I’ll be honest here: I tried to take the guy’s f-ing head off. I followed it up with some talking of my own:

“You want to know how it feels? THAT’S how it feels, motherf----r!!!”

Of course, you can’t do this in flag football, and my little attempt at cleaning up the game had consequences both that day and afterward. Things started out stupidly, and they got stupid(er) as the situation went on. I’m sure you can figure out what happened next. The point here, however, is that even though I wasn’t the greatest football player in the world, the chasm between a “guy who actually played” and a 45-year-old gym guy wannabe is pretty damned wide when it comes time to demonstrate a set of skills one guy (me) had been practicing for the majority of his life.

In any case, I was thinking about that game today while watching random training clips on YouTube. I do that a lot. I think we all do. We’re all pleasantly amazed when we stumble upon a clip of some kid nobody’s ever heard of performing a 93” box jump, then doing a backflip off the platform and landing in a handstand. We see stuff like this, and we say, “Holy shit! That guy belongs in the NFL!”

We look at clips of “streetball” basketball players, and we’re amazed we’re not seeing these guys playing in the NBA. Sometimes when I check out these clips, something will happen that’s so amazing that I say, “How could anyone possibly be better than this guy?”

I’ve even gone so far as to share the indignation expressed by the people posting the videos. “Wow,” I’ll say. “They’re right! This guy’s skills are so astonishing that it’s really unfair that he’s not getting his shot. Professional sports is all politics, man.”

You know what, though? The secret to keeping a level head about this sort of thing is to spit out the Kool-Aid and do a little reality check when you’re cruising the internet looking at this stuff. The reality of the situation is that professional athletes are really, really good at what they do.

Maybe you went to high school with a guy who ended up playing a professional sport. Do you remember what he was like back then? Do you remember how he was twice as big, strong and fast as everyone else? Do you remember batting against the guy who’s pitching in the major leagues now, and how you couldn’t even see the damned ball? I was dunked on once in a high school basketball game by a guy who went on to play ten years as a wide receiver in the NFL. I tried to take a charge (it was my only option), and he simply jumped over me.

Well, despite the proliferation of YouTube, those guys are still like that. They’re still way better than you, they’re way better than me, and they’re miles better than the junior college kid from Montana who can bench 600 pounds blindfolded with just his left hand.

We’d love to look at someone we know, or train, or see on the internet, and say they’re among the best in the world at what they do, and in some cases maybe they are, but there’s a proving ground for that. It’s called professional sports. There’s a reason some guys get paid millions of dollars to do what they do, while others occupy themselves by throwing clips of backyard box jumps on YouTube. It’s because the guys making millions of dollars are simply better at what they do. Remember that the next time you’re fooled into thinking a snappy set of pistol squats entitles you to a multimillion dollar contract.