Descent with Modification

Many of you reading this now plunge headlong into the dialectical undertaking that encompasses fanhood. As such you not only have certain visceral, umbilical ties to given teams (look to the right for a reason why this is awesome) but, in some ways more importantly, you also have an analytical interest in the creation of athletic artistry, both as active participants as well as active observers.

It is into this analytical interest that I hope to dig. In the latest New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell tackles the issue of genius and invention, approaching an issue near and dear to my own interest in the delineation between artistic and scientific discovery. He, as many, considers the former a monumental and unique progeny of individual genius and particular milieu, while the latter is the sluggish outcome of inevitability. My personal feeling about this topic is for another forum, but I will say that there is a certain progression to the history of art, and a particular magic to iterations of scientific achievement.

Before I lose your attention I’ll bring this ramble back a bit: where does the individual athlete fit into this schema. I know the answer coursing through every mind- certainly the athlete is akin to the artist; AI’s silky game bears the ink of unjust prosecution while Carmelo remorselessly shoots as if in the commons of the Wire. Well, tell me that Lebron James wasn’t inevitable.

Monday night, vacationing from school, I watched LBJ play a game that really was the product of what came before him. There were no wild eyed screams of selfishness as he hoisted up short after long after off-right, rather a pleased understanding that ‘shooters have to shoot’. And when he elevated through the vaunted Celtics D with that dunk, there was no amazement, only a nod that the universe had realigned.

Lebron James is inevitable, the power and skill, the media embrace, all as expected as the re-birth of realist art in the 15th century or the relativity of Einstein’s genius.