answer:When businessmen realized they could make tons of money off of “selling” the games that the public wanted to watch (be it baseball, football, whatever), they “bought” the services of the pro athletes so as to eliminate competition and insure they were getting all the money flooding into pro sports. The problem is businessmen aren’t going to just say, oh well that athlete already makes $60,000 a year so he’s overpaid and I’m not going to pay him more than that simply because he’ll make me millions of dollars. So the businessmen compete with one another, and the highest bidder wins. Essentially pro-athletes are paid outrageous sums of money to “play” games, because those games bring in billions of dollars, and the “owners” of those games need to pay them the most money to keep them from going to competitors.