Most professional athletes aren’t obsessive just because they have a weirdly specific passion for their sport. They’re obsessive because they’re pathologically competitive. There’s stories about eg Michael Jordan buying a ping pong table and obsessively practicing at ping pong because he had a teammate who beat him at ping pong once and he wasn’t able to let it go until he beat the guy in a rematch. Obsession can come from many sources.
The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.
Success (by which most people mean financial success, fame, or winning in some competition) is certainly worshipped.
However, just being "a hard worker" in itself is considered a virtue by many people.
I hesitate to call it the Protestant Work Ethic or the Puritan Work Ethic, as it's far from limited to Protestants or Puritans, but that's really what it is. The harder you work, the more virtuous you are considered to be, and working less is considered sinful or lazy (in other words, unvirtuous and blame-worthy).
Being better than other hard working people can also involve simply kicking the ladder from underneath you, playing the social status game or making bets at the edge of the law and shoving that risk onto other people.
And sometimes no matter how hard you work, you're one of those people under the rungs.