When an athlete succumbs
to a serious injury, it is an insignificant and very significant thing. Both, at the same time.
It is insignificant
because these are athletes, playing a game.
There is war and senseless killing going right now not too far away
which is all across the front page of every newspaper, and while an injury is
painful to witness, it looks like nothing compared to that sort of
suffering.
This is, of course,
a pretty callous and cold view. But it is important to place things in some
perspective. The type of harm is coming
to someone at the peak of their health, it is coming to harm someone who
already has the best care in the world.
It is not coming on the already downtrodden, the exploited, the sick and
the poor. The type of harm that happens
to them can’t be the same sort of brutalization, dehumanization which happens
in war or at the hands of oppression.
Nevertheless, on the
other hand, sport is where athletes dedicate that very human frame which
suffers so much elsewhere to acts which precisely embody the perfection of
which it is capable. So an injury that
occurs there is almost worse. It is like
losing a work of art, seeing it marred and desecrated.
Something that is
supposed to image the best that is possible, as concretely as possible, is
ripped and torn until it can’t ever pursue that kind of perfection again. Or if it does pursue it, and does not do so
at nearly the same health as before, it becomes a pathetic substitute of the
very pursuit of that perfection—the game becomes a mockery of itself in that
body.
The back and forth
has to do with the fact that such injuries involve a dedicated body, a body
that is and is not like normal human’s bodies.
Not in the way it is constructed, but in what it dedicates itself
to. Sport involves the body, and the body
alone, in a way that even art—even dance—cannot achieve. Nothing besides war involves such intense
commitment of the human body to the achievement of a task—and that sport is not
dedicated to the ends of war in fact makes the commitment that much more total.
The problem is that injuries
are the one thing that can’t be overcome by this dedication. And so the pain is great and awkward: while
suffering occurs almost pointlessly elsewhere, an injury strikes at the heart of
precisely the meaningful thing about a player, the thing he tries most to
perfect, craft, and which cannot be damaged at all if he is going to pursue his aim. In other words, with an injury, we
understand that something dynamic, acrobatic, flexible and resilient is more
fragile, brittle than we thought it was. It is like reality is telling us all
that no, we shall not achieve greatness with our bodies. We get the feeling that success is
impossible.
And this is both a
stupid feeling—because most people don’t have the opportunity to even think
about that sort of success—and a poignant one—because if the athlete can’t do something,
then we certainly are less capable than we thought we were.
The thing is, the
sudden twist of reality that happened tonight, whereby it tells him what he was
doing is impossible, never applied to him before, and may never apply again (though
it may not need to, of course). It doesn’t
even apply to the other players on the court.
And so whatever conclusions we’re going to be drawing about the reaches
of human excellence seem meaningless. And
we’re thrown back on the most stupid and obvious thought: if the injury wouldn’t
have happened to him, he’d be fine. It’s
an undeserved and almost pointless lesson.
We don’t know the
full severity of the injury. Sometimes
injuries like that heal better than if it were, say, an ACL tear, people are
saying. All I know is I’ve never seen a leg
do that before. It brought up the words
in everyone’s minds: career-ending. It
was not only proper but common sense to cancel the game when something of that
nature happens. You can’t play
basketball when everyone is sick to their stomachs.
I don’t think it
will indeed end George’s career as such.
But it could well be career-ending because it may be one of those
injuries that permanently alters a career—ending it in effect, as it were, and
forcing a player to begin again. The
player becomes someone else afterwards.
And Paul George was so promising, so amazing, recently, that it is hard
to think that anything he became wouldn’t be a loss, on the whole. While the praise for him last year was
perhaps a little overblown, it was not that wrong, either, and the criticism
and scrutiny he fell under as a player for this bizarre 2013-14 Pacers team was
in a large part unmerited.
While George did not
play as well as perhaps he could have, he still put up better numbers than ever
in his career. And while the team in
general was turning into garbage all around him, he put up numbers that were
not only respectable, but which allowed the team to put up a semblance of a
fight throughout its struggles. In many
ways, he carried the team this year.
And by playoff time,
whatever funk he himself was in had gone away, and he came out with amazing
numbers and amazing performances. His
shooting was still streakier than usual, but when it looked normal, he
obliterated teams with threes. His
decisionmaking was good. His defense—which
is arguably the best at the position—was as on point as ever. And he remained the only player in the league
besides Kawhi Leonard who could effectively guard LeBron James, which is an achievement
that can’t be underestimated. That he looked like the only player out there on
the floor for Indiana didn’t actually seem to matter. Their sloppiness, confusion, and ineffectiveness
also underlined how great a player he was becoming.
Now, that’s all up
in the air. The last thing you would
have expected for George was an injury. Everything
that was meaningful in his career—even the weird off-court stuff that was going
on with George—took a hit from this. He
will no longer be the next phenom, the rival to LeBron, who has to overcome
strange and possibly seedy off-court issues to focus and challenge. It is not only the short-term damage that is
done to a player, it is the entire career arc that changes, the dedication of
that body to something completely different, the life to a different meaning.
Shaun Livingston is
a testament to the way that a player can come back effectively, if not better,
than they were from a near career-ending injury. I for one am looking forward to what Livingston
can do at Golden State next year, and I think it may be more than anything he
could have achieved without what happened to him. He had some wise words about what happened to tonight, and said he believed the same would happen to George.
In the end I’m
brought back, though, to the type of violence that we witnessed tonight, and I
don’t know how to categorize it, to think about it. I don’t know, at bottom, how real it is, how
weighty it is, and where it falls in the scheme of things. It’s not right to demarcate between “real”
and “unreal” suffering, but the question of which one it is keeps coming up. And I’m not helped by these reflections. If even the lessons we can take away from what
happened are possibly pointless, as we said, does that make what happened to George count
as a more serious type of suffering?
Does it make it more real? Or
even less serious?
Perhaps, though,
there is another lesson, coming out of the discomfort itself. Injuries in sports might be important because
they simply reinforce just how troubled this distinction can be. At its heart, the strangeness and discomfort
that we get from watching an athlete’s injury is that it is very much real:
suddenly what was at bottom nothing more the playing out of a set of abstract possibilities
with a ball and some lines on some wood has a significant human consequence on
par with the sheer brutality of actions occurring elsewhere in the heat of
enmity and hatred.
But sport defies us
to conclude that what makes reality—as opposed to mere play—so damned real is that
it is more brutal. Instead, it makes
pain part of a game, in minor ways, but also in moments like this. And in the process it shows that suffering
can be, if not exactly managed—as these catastrophes show and one of the main things about
pain is that it jars and disrupts—then integrated into a process,
where we can do something with it, at the very least say something about it,
think on it, mind it. This injury doesn’t
make George any less of an athlete. It
may make him more of one. And that shows
that the nature of the real, whatever lies outside the game, isn’t by nature
violent.
And this is
important because it gives us hope.
Reality may be uncontrollable, random, bizarre, hostile to humanity and
the human body. But precisely because
injuries are such a large part of sports, because sport itself takes on the
character of violence, in the pain it asks athletes to endure and survive, it
actually gives us the chance to think that what lies outside the game isn’t
outside the game merely because it is cruel.
It’s outside the game for all sorts of reasons: because it’s more
complex, because it is more diverse, because it doesn’t play by rules, and
near-miraculous things can happen in it, because it doesn’t involve as much
competition, because it allows for more friendship, because it allows for
greater competition, because it allows for wide forms of human expression. In this case in particular, what comes to
mind is that reality might be more forgiving, on the whole, than what is
happening in basketball, full of good health coming to people just because they
are people, just because they are living.
And this gives us
hope, as bizarre as that sounds. I don’t
think I am trying to wrest anything hokey and positive out of George’s injury by
saying that. I think instead that George’s
injury tells us something, in everything that makes it hard and difficult to think
about. That there’s hope isn’t always a
comforting message, either—just as there is hope for George’s career, and this
means he will have to put himself through even more difficulty and perhaps more
prolonged and even more damaging pain to realize that hope. It’s just something this makes us aware
of. And that we needed to be more aware
of. And that’s encouraging, even if it
is itself painful to know.
