The Rise of the Sports Revolutionary

Turn on an NBA playoff game right before tip-off and you’ll see ten men who have no idea what’s about to happen. Their individual activities—their crossovers, skip passes, air balls, rotations, floaters, closeouts—will soon produce something genuinely new, something that transcends any single player’s intention and each team’s careful game plan. The game they will play, on a court whose general dimensions haven’t changed in a century, will have a distinct narrative, one that will differ, ever so slightly, from that of every other basketball game in history. The ingredients of that narrative—miraculous comebacks and heartbreaking collapses, individual masterpieces and stunning feats of team cooperation—are composed of the tiniest moments, split-second decisions that require the coordination of innumerable elements. A no-look pass in a critical fourth-quarter possession is a highwire act. Will the pass’s intended target slide into the corner to receive it? Will he get his shot up just a tenth of a second faster than his defender can close out? The greatest players seem able to bend the history of their sport before our eyes, but they never act alone.