PicoBlog

- Blake Griffin | Nike | Saint Studio

Blake Griffin recently announced his retirement from the NBA after 14 seasons. After taking the league by storm with his spectacular dunks early in his career as part of the Lob City era of the Los Angeles Clippers, injuries took their toll on him. And though he managed to become an arguably more effective player, taking the Pistons to the playoffs in 2019, it was clear afterwards that his body was no longer what it was. Though many players retire at 35 or even before that, Griffin's physical decline is particularly interesting because there were and have been only few players who dominated in the air like he did. 

What was so disappointing about Griffin winning the dunk contest in 2011 wasn’t necessarily that the dunk was unimpressive — jumping over a car is a feat that not too many people in the world can achieve. What was disappointing about the dunk, and the dunk contest in general, was that it wasn’t faithful to what made Griffin such a ridiculous force of nature.

Most professional athletes exist in a higher physical reality than the general population. Unlike the rest of us, they train their bodies every day, testing and overcoming their physical limits, as a necessary way to achieve their individual and team goals. This is helped by the fact that they have access to the best facilities and trainers that the world has to offer. Even the athletes that look slow and unathletic in comparison to the best in their field, would generally dominate and make regular people look like children if they were to compete against us. 

This means that the athletes who stand out even amongst the population of physically refined athletes in their sport exist on a plane that is even more removed from our standard world. They are gods amongst gods. They make their peers, who have put endless hours of training and diet, look as if they are like the rest of us. As if their victims were mere pedestrians rather than incredible athletes who have reached a level of bodily performance that puts them in such rarified air that millions of people sit around to watch them put a ball through a hoop because the sheer fact of watching these people move, jump, and contest against each other inspires awe. 

Yet there always seems to be this hesitation to praise physicality. As soon as an athlete like Blake Griffin appears, the conversation becomes about the requirement for him to develop his skills further. That he can’t depend on his body. Which is true, in the sense that since so many of the great athletes are physically talented, in order to be truly great or to survive in those leagues, a player needs to find a way to do more. But there’s always this hesitation, or rather, a desire to reduce athletes who are physically forces. As if they’re simply lucky, unskilled, or cheating at the game. That running and dunking is nothing special. 

It’s always interesting to see such arguments about physicality as being unskilled being made, for several reasons. For one, it ignores the reality that there have been many tall, fast, strong players come through a league like the NBA, and many at the same time who share similar profiles, yet for some reason, a few tend to stand out and be more effective than the others. If it was simply about physical profile, every player who comes in the league with those attributes should go on to be great. But that’s hardly ever the case. 

Another reason is elitism. Most people aren’t as concerned with the physically outstanding player lasting long in the league or succeeding when they suggest that they should play in a different way, they simply see the other style of play as superior, as true, as more indicative of what basketball is, than how the physically outstanding player goes about their job. Which is strange because if the goal of each trip down the court is to score points and one can do it by dunking the ball over smaller players, that simplifies the equation and makes things easier for teammates and coaches. If the defense has to send multiple players over to stop a player from doing that simple action, it also allows the rest of the team to be more effective. 

A third reason is what I think of as awe, terror, or a better way to put it is the feeling of inferiority. Someone being taller, stronger, faster, feels unfair. In that it feels that they were gifted these qualities, they just hit the physical lottery, and so they have an unfair advantage over those who are working within smaller limits. The physically outstanding player becomes like the beautiful person who is chided for not having a great personality because people feel like they have always gotten what they wanted in life easily. 

But the terror of that position is that we know that these people are unreachable. Someone like Griffin exists so much outside the realm of possibility for most people, and most athletes, that the only way to engage with them outside of marveling at the fact of their existence is to dismiss them completely. To say that their way of existence on the court doesn’t count until they are more like us. To clap for his dunks when he’s in his prime, but to truly praise him for refining his game when those physical attributes have lessened and he has to lead the Detroit Pistons with a bandaged knee. 

By doing this though, we miss out on sitting with the terror of a player like him. One of the most prominent feelings that I had when watching the young Griffin catch the ball at speed and go up against a defender, sometimes of his size, sometimes smaller, was that of watching something near incomprehensible. There was no way that someone should have been that size, be that fast, and have such great control of his body and awareness of space and timing, that he could routinely physically instill the same terror and smallness that we have when standing next to the average NBA player in his peers. He was the bigger fish in the pond. 

His dunks weren’t just about height and power, they were violent. There have been many great dunkers in the league, like Vince Carter who epitomized grace and imagination, as much as he did jumping ability. Griffin was more like watching a semi-truck hit SUVs at full speed. Or not even that, because there were defenders who were bigger than him and stronger than him, but could not deal with the combination of everything his body and mind had come together to create. Not only was he strong and could jump high, but he had the intelligence to time his jumps perfectly and catch the defenders off-guard, off-balance, or make them slightly hesitant to give himself an advantage that they couldn’t recover from. And then the body control to hang in the air as they were coming down, or to maneuver himself in the air to avoid being thwarted by them. They went up against him with all the power and height that they possessed and found that there was an extra quality that he had that gave him the victory. And those victories looked like car crashes where one car comes out unscathed and the victim is totaled in body and spirit. 

That had always been my favorite thing about Griffin in his prime. He inspired fear in a group of people who had always been at the physical top of human existence. He made them scared to jump. He made their hearts drop when he spun around them and took off into the air. He made them second guess their instincts to prevent their opponent from scoring. And when he dunked over them and put them on posters, he didn’t just embarrass them, since everyone gets dunked on eventually, but he made them consider the gap between what they could do and what he could do. You could see it in the faces of people who went up to contest and even foul him, that there was a powerlessness and an acceptance of a physical superiority. In those moments that he was already in the air before they could assess the situation, they were like children to the rest of us. 

This relationship that Griffin had to his victims embodied and simplified the awe of watching professional athletes. We’re watching an exceptional group of human beings do what the rest of us can only dream of. Not only in the physical realm, but in the mental in how much information they’re able to process in such a short amount of time, and then how to use that information to creatively solve the problem in front of them. What Griffin did was to remove hope from the equation. To push his opponents to despair. To make them feel that in that moment that they’re in the air with him, he has absolute dominance. That is a humbling feeling for anyone, but especially for people who make their living through their body. 

As a fan, it was a level of spectacular physical violence that was beautiful to watch. And more than looking to see how he would play when his dictatorship in the air ended, I was grateful that he had appeared and every time he was running at the rim, I was excited to see which defender he was going to force into an existential crisis. 

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