There are lots of Jews who have been successful in sports. Prof. Gurock at YU even wrote a book about them! But almost none have been shomer Shabat and the way the sports industry is set up it would be almost impossible for a successful athlete to keep Shabat. We should encourage our young people to emulate those who are successful in what they do and keep HaShem’s commandments.
Some very notable examples of that are US Senator Joe Lieberman; Cantor Dudu Fisher who was a cantor before he became a Broadway star — and had his Broadway debut delayed for years because he would not under any circumstances perform on Shabat; the great novelist Herman Wouk whose shipmates in World War II attributed their ship’s survival of a Japanese kamikaze attack to “Lt. Wouk’s magic black boxes” he would put on every morning; Prof. Robert Aumann, the graduate of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshiva who won a Nobel Prize in Economics; Michael Mukasey, the Ramaz School graduate who served as a federal judge and US Attorney General; and Howard Jonas, the founder of a telecom company who has given millions to tzedakah and set up a beit midrash in his corporate headquarters. And these are just some of the folks who were successful in the non-Jewish world; imagine the number of great rabbis and teachers who can also serve as models for us. Why encourage our young people to emulate sports figures when we have these kind of great examples?