I think the statements indicate a broader trend: among athletes who are collectively within the same skill class, the arrangement of the playing surfaces play a more dominant role than individual variation in athlete skill.
This is trivially true of you define skill classes narrowly enough. If the non-trivial claim your trying to make is that the class of all professional athletes is such a skill class, you have yet to present any valid evidence for your claim.
I am taking all pro athletes to be in the same skill class purely as my own approximation. I haven't supplied any evidence because I don't have any and I didn't claim that I did. I only have the loose statistics that my friend showed me in a few charts for the presentation he is making. I thought it was obvious from my post that I was speculating a plausible explanation given what appears to be evidence that the physical parameters of games have evolved to produce certain statistical regularities in performance.
When you move away from professional caliber ...
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/09/22/cognitive-biases-in-sports-the-irrationality-of-coaches-commentators-and-fans/