Perhaps it is time to coordinate an emergency delivery of some rudimentary lessons about human biology to the sportswriters of America. It was less than a month ago that The Athletic’s Fred Katz mistook the basic act of “hearing things” for echolocation, and now we are confronted with ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne forgetting how eyeballs work.
Here is a snippet from Shelburne’s most recent article, about how Russell Westbrook has fit in with the Denver Nuggets this season:
IF YOU CLOSED your eyes and watched Westbrook warm up on the Paycom Center court, a full three hours before Games 1 and 2 of this second-round playoff series between the Nuggets and Thunder, it’d be easy to feel as if you’d gone back in time.
Immediately we are in big trouble here. The English language is vast, and you could probably spend the next few hours compiling a list of words that could be counted on to slot legibly into a sentence that begins, “If you closed your eyes and…” Listened, jumped, disemboweled—all of these would be better choices than “watched,” which is the one thing a person really cannot do when their eyes are shut.
Perhaps you are thinking this was just exceptionally clumsy word choice. You can certainly read that paragraph, ignore the presence of “watched,” and find the shape of what Shelburne might have been trying to communicate: That if you were to sit in the Thunder arena and take in the atmosphere while Westbrook was warming up, and you were to ignore the sight of him wearing a Nuggets uniform and being 36 years old, it might feel like you’d traveled back in time. But then comes the next paragraph:
Because 36-year-old Westbrook still looks like prime, 30-year-old Westbrook who nearly tore the cover off this arena during his glory years: His chiseled physique remains; his meticulously planned warmup starts at exactly the same time it used to, and lasts exactly the same amount of time.
Ramona Shelburne accepts your charitable reading of her previous paragraph, spits on it, and then throws it back into your face! She stands before you and asks, nay, demands, that you dispense with all basic understanding of sensory perception so that you may imagine yourself standing before Russell Westbrook, sealing your eyes shut, and then perceiving the details of his chiseled physique and intricate warmup routine.
Maybe there is an art or literary theorist who could make some sense of such a strange demand, but the rest of us are just going to have to go on being driven mad by the prose stylings of NBA reporters until they are each given an encyclopedia.