It may be time to coordinate the emergency delivery of certain rudimentary lessons on human biology to American sports writers. Less than a month ago, Fred Katz of athletics confused the basic act “hearing things” for echolocation, and now we are faced with Ramona Shelburne of ESPN forgetting the functioning of the eyeballs.
Here is an extract from the most recent article in Shelburne, on how Russell Westbrook has transformed with the Denver Nuggets this season:
If you have closed Your eyes and watched Westbrook warm up on the short Paycc Center, three full hours before matches 1 and 2 of this series of qualifying series of the second round between the Nuggets and the Thunder, it would be easy to feel as if you had risen in time.
Immediately, we have big problems here. The English language is vast, and you could probably spend the next hours compile a list of words that could be counted to read readibly in a sentence that begins: “If you have closed your eyes and …” Listen,, jumped,, overflowed– All of this would be better than “monitoring”, which is the only thing that a person really can’t do when their eyes are closed.
Maybe you think it was just an exceptionally clumsy choice of words. You can certainly read this paragraph, ignore the presence of “watched” and find the form of what Shelburne could have tried to communicate: that if you had to sit in the thunder arena and take the atmosphere while Westbrook warmed up, and you had to refuse to come back in time. But then comes the following paragraph:
Because Westbrook, 36, still looks like Prime, Westbrook, 30, who almost torn off the cover of this arena during his years of glory: his chopped physique remains; Its meticulously planned warm -up begins exactly at the same time, and lasts exactly the same time.
Ramona Shelburne accepts your charitable reading of her previous paragraph, spits on it, then throws him into the face! She stands in front of you and asks – no, asks you to do without any basic understanding of sensory perception so that you can imagine standing in front of Russell Westbrook, sealing your eyes, then perceiving the details of her chopped physique and her complex warm -up routine.
There is perhaps an art or literary theorist who could give meaning to such a strange demand, but the rest of us will simply have to be crazy by the prose styles of NBA journalists until they each receive an encyclopedia.
