No, it's not ridiculous. It's high level competition, that's all. The question on the table was "is gaming a professional sport?" To answer it, you need to compare it to and base it on other professional sports. Comparing it to something else, something lower, is just wrong.
I honestly couldn't compare professional gaming to professional level sports, just wouldn't know how to do it. Even when comparing it to much lower forms of 'other' sports it's hard to not make the premise of gaming as a sport seem like a complete joke.
You can't use levels of physicality and athleticism required to say something is more or less of a sport than something else. The majority of sports require different types of fitness and athletic ability. Tennis players need a combination of short-sprint speed and long match endurance. F1 drivers need exceptional reactions and fitness. Marathon runners pretty much just require fitness. Golfers need explosive one shot power, and physical fitness to maintain posture. Footballers need high-impact physicality. Sports are different from one another, so if the question is "is gaming a professional sport?", you need to compare it to professional sports.
You've just shown as to why you can though, they not only need various ranges of physical attributes to excell but varying magnitudes. At the absolute maximum level, every sport has it's requirements and is no less of a sport than something else from an ubiased point of view. Football requires very little strength or physical endurance/toughness but requires a gigantic amount of stamina and cardio. Tennis requires decent strength and high cardio with mental ability to coordinate under fatigue. M.M.A requires extreme amounts of cardio and physical endurance/toughness and the rest is variable dependant on weight class/fighting style. So on, so on...
By this reasoning, I wouldn't consider any of the sports either of us mentioned to be lesser sports or greater sports other besides golf, which I would rank as a physically lesser sport. Although I guess that is opinion or bias as I value high-physicality sports over those of the mind like golf, which is why I found it difficult (less so now) to accept golf as a sport, and will never accept gaming/darts/chess/snooker as sports.
For the record though, I actually think gaming is not a professional sport. My reasoning is quite simple. When I go to the park and play football, the basic level of sport, I feel like I'm playing a sport. When I'm playing games on my couch, the basic level of gaming, I don't feel like I'm playing a sport. I feel like I'm playing a game.
Exactly, requires no athleticism in it's current state.
I find the way a lot of things are coined as sports to be wrong and there needs to be other labels for them. Hunting takes a lot of skill, especially with non-firearms, but it isn't a sport even if you're competing for better trophies. Chess takes a lot of skill, as does darts take a lot of coordination and accuracy, snooker requires dynamic understanding of angles and momentum and so on. None of them require physicality though which is what I believe to be a sport. They just need seperate labels, and I am in no way shape or form trying to dismerit them with that statement.
Are you seriously comparing tennis and gaming, in terms of fitness levels required?
Go tell that to two of my friends who are professional tennis coaches. They are the fittest people I know!
No, that would be a ridiculous thing to do.