I know a lot of NCAA champions go on to have success in international competitions and a lot of wrestlers who never won a NCAA championship also have success but I also don't want to water down the term world class and throw it around too casually. That is why I feel it is a little better to start with a smaller indisputable list and then build it up from there as we discuss others.
Calling every All-American world class seems a little too liberal for me. I think a decent criteria would be top 10 in the world. Maybe top 15. But like I said earlier maybe I am being too strict with the term.
I am also not trying to be "less wrong". I am not trying to win some internet argument and I am sorry if it came off that way. I am relatively new to being a fan of amateur wrestling and just enjoy talking about it with other fans. I have already learned things in this thread and have enjoyed the discussion.
My post there was generally a reply to the OP (since i wasn't quoting anyone), not you specifically if there is any confusion. Also don't mean to imply some sort of posturing there or anything like that; when i say 'less wrong' i mean that in the technical sense of the term, that of meaning to reduce one's risks of saying something off-base, or reducing the degrees to which one's statements may be off-base (sometimes this can mean not saying anything at all even on a given topic). Something we'd all like to endeavor for i think, even if not explicitly conscious of it in such terms.
Now, since you bring you up, lexical sorcery and memeti-sophistical arcana does happen to be an abiding concern of mine, so if the subject is the relative merits of comparative semantic deployments im happy to hold forth.
I do feel that is a rather restrictive usage, perhaps unreasonably so even... since it leaves open certain rhetorical blind spots. Lets explain that thought.
So on the one hand you've got your average guy wrestler who possibly dipped into the sport during their school years and maybe even placed at regionals one year; this term, 'average wrestler', covers a whole lot of people who do wrestling, by definition in fact. On the other hand, we have the top ten, top fifteen guys in the world, the best of the best, the tippy tip top who beat everyone and anyone except each other; here these are termed 'world class'. And then next, the term we use for guys who are much better and more successful than a large number of your 'average' or 'regional' guys, but who are yet not exactly the tippy tip top either is... what? What is the word we will use to describe these people? Who are not 'world class' the way we are using world class here, but who are definitely not 'average' either? These sorts of people exist obviously, so how do we talk about them?
There actually is more or less already a term for 'top umpteen in the world', which
is in fact, 'the best of the best'. You could have more than a thousand extremely good wrestlers, the best wrestlers in the world, all very finely matched... yet never the less, however good they may all be in an
absolute sense... there can only be one to take the number one slot. One out of however many however close or far the competition may otherwise be. Like wise, there can only be ten top ten, and so on. There being here a whole host of otherwise very good competitors elided outside of that narrow slice. What phrase could you use to refer to such sorts of athletes, who are very good, very good competitors, the sort of guys who can show up to world stages and win matches, the sort of guys who
make the world stages what they are, yet never the less lie outside the tyranny of numbers?
I'd say, one phrase as good as any other here would be 'world class'.
