From Chaos

photo from: http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/goldslide/school_athens.jpg

"That which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is."--Plato, Timaeus

Modern sport exists because of the path blazed by those who no longer play. In order to sustain public attention, sports need iconic figures that capture the imagination of the nation. They long for players who grace the covers of TIME and Newsweek. They yearn for hosts of Saturday Night Live. They thrive on identies that are so transcendant that they cannot be contained by a single forum. Anecdotes of mythic proportion need to sprout around them.

Baseball has been the preminent purveyor of this attitude over the years. McGwire, Sosa, and Ripken chased the essence of players long deceased, hoping to unleash a sense of nostalgia that would reignite interest. The NFL cycles through mixtures of Horatio Alger stories and Herculean feats of strength that both personify and inspire awe in their product.


photo from: http://z.about.com/d/atheism/1/8/k/d/SamuelAnointsSaul1.jpg

But while baseball and football have been able to implement the genius of Eli Whitney into their leagues with ease, the NBA has always struggled in trying to replace a person instead of an idea. In the decade that followed his retirement, the NBA embarked on an Odysseus like journey searching for the "next" Jordan. But like Israel in the Old Testament, the NBA relied on sense alone to anoint their king. Vince Carter, Grant Hill, Jerry Stackhouse, Penny Hardaway, Kobe Bryant, all fit the mold of the next Jordan, but there was little more than aesthetics to why. Each player was always on the verge of becoming the next Jordan, but no player reached the zenith. This futile search though has led the NBA to modify the way they market themselves: To succeed their must be harmony in proportion.

The part is always imperfect to the whole. Lebron does not exist without Carmelo, Dwayne, and Bosh. Durant will always be paired with Oden. The Pistons are an incomplete entity without all five players. So instead of the disorder that arises out of attempting to find the "next Jordan," the NBA has made their "Second Coming" full of order by replacing Jordan with not one but ten. Instead of finding one player to remind fans of Jordan, the League rests its hope on a group to generate the mathleticism, marketability, and swagger, that Jordan provided for fifteen years We both step and do not step in the same rivers.


photo from: http://www.methodstudios.com/project/952/images/2.html