The impending NBA season marks the return to play of star players Derrick Rose and Kobe Bryant from injury. We have seen both athletes get the longform journalism treatment. Chis Ballard wrote on Kobe in late-August for Sports Illustrated. Last week Wright Thompson wrote on Rose for ESPN The Magazine.
I remember being blown away by what Bryant accomplished leading up to his 2013 late-season injury, leaving it all out on the court for his team. Rose has been interesting for the protracted rehabilitation from his 2012 ACL reconstruction, which included a 2013 early-season meniscal tear setback. So much time has passed that these men would have changed as people even without their injuries, but the process of returning to play the sport that defines each man, that has to be reflected in the core of their very being. The stories of their challenges are goods fit for the longform genre and they are an effective way to humanize the elite, evolving athlete.
The deep wells of character and dedication from the comeback narratives now collide against harsh criticism for subpar performances as the daily reports come in on both players, saying clear and loud how the two players are now failing in their task to play elite-level basketball. These are clearly changed men who are being tested at the highest competitive level, and so their games are evolving before our eyes. Coaches ask for patience but writers have little.
Rose lacks the ability to translate his forward speed into rapid, vertical explosion but still appears to be one of the fastest players on Earth, so the old pet moves aren’t there but new ones, still based on his physical advantage, are bound to appear. More of Bryant’s athleticism has been compromised than Rose’s, but his enormous guile and competitive intelligence remain, and I look forward to seeing those gifts put to use.
The Best Things I Read Last Week:
- USA Women’s Volleyball Win First International Title Train Ugly blog … World-beating success using performance science. Be sure to follow the links at the bottom of the post for more good info.
- Inside German Football: Hoffenheim put the building blocks in place and Access to cutting-edge game analysis is helping German football thrive The Irish Times … Two features in a great series how investments in science and training continue to transform German soccer.
- Part I | Head-On: Confronting the science of concussions Yale Daily News … Far more attention goes to post-concussion CTE but there is a revolution under way in understanding how brains function, how they become damaged and how they repair themselves.
- Why we need to move up the value pyramid for health tech VentureBeat … The article lays out a path from using abundant health data to make guesses to making actual evidence-based decisions with that data. My opinion: There are way, way too many guesses being made in Applied Sports Science.
- Bilateral Differences in Muscle Architecture Are Associated With Increased Rate of Injury in National Basketball Association Players. Journal of Athletic Training … Researchers working with the Orlando Magic report that left-right muscle imbalances make NBA players more vulnerable to lower extremity injuries.