Adolf Hitler was nearly an artist before he got rejected from art school. Dolph Lundgren has a master's degree in chemical engineering but chose to go into direct-to-DVD action movies instead. And they're not the only ones; somewhere, there's an alternate reality completely different from ours, where the following people went with their first career choice (for better or worse).

5 Fidel Castro: Major League Baseball Pitcher

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Fidel Castro's passion for baseball is often seen as just another dictator's eccentricity, like Hitler's love for Disney characters or Saddam Hussein's romance-novel-writing hobby. Actually, it was much more than that: Not only did the human embodiment of international communism play the most American of sports in his youth, but he was close to moving to the U.S. and pitching for the Giants.

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"Play ball! I mean, uh, power to the people and stuff ..."

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Back in the 1940s, Cuba was just a sunny little country with a U.S.-backed government, and Fidel Castro was just a student at the University of Havana who loved baseball. Castro was a pitcher for the university's baseball team, and he threw such a great curveball that Major League Baseball teams began sending scouts to check him out. The Pittsburgh Pirates even sent a few of their players to test out the young pitcher, which resulted in Castro striking out future Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg.

fangraphs.com Wiki

"I still see that beard every time I close my eyes."

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In 1949, the then New York Giants offered Castro a juicy contract that included a $5,000 signing bonus to come play baseball in the United States. Castro was already politically active and critical of U.S. imperialism at this time ... and yet he still took several days to think over the offer, consulting with his friends and family about what he should do. Eventually he turned down the contract, which took the Giants completely by surprise: Apparently, he was the first Latin American to say no to them.