Photograph by Erik Drost, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

At times of especially blessed sports spectatorship, which the Knicks’ past few weeks have undoubtedly been, I often return to David Foster Wallace’s 2007 essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” Ostensibly a pan of the tennis player’s 1992 memoir, Beyond Center Court, the piece is really about the perceived chasm between a great athlete’s genius and their apparent inability to talk about it after the fact. Whether players are recounting their in-game heroics moments later, as in a postgame interview, or years later, as in memoir form, they tend to deliver the same clichés: We’re taking each game one point at a time, focusing on the fundamentals, believing in the team. 

I thought of this again after Game Four of the NBA Finals, when OG Anunoby addressed reporters at Madison Square Garden. They were marveling at his now-famous tip-in, sunk with 1.2 seconds left on the clock. “You just hit the game-winning shot in an NBA Finals game in front of your home crowd,” asked one reporter. “How does that feel?”

“It feels cool.” This said shrugging. “I mean, everyone’s pretty excited. I’m excited too.”

An eruption of laughter; OG’s guileless what-am-I-supposed-to-say smile. “We’re all excited,” he elaborated. “We’re just focused on the next game now.”

For Wallace, this kind of routine is “bitterly disappointing.” He wants ever-closer access to his heroes’ quasimystical abilities, but their language invariably fails to close the gap. By the end of the essay, he has resigned himself to this “cruel paradox”: “that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.” 

I would propose an alternative model. We spectators, attempting to wedge the exhilaration of kinesthetics into language, are not truthful illuminators but addicts—grasping at words to explain and recapture the euphoria of witness. Of course, these attempts fail by definition, because one of the elite athlete’s gifts is to leave language behind. Their state of grace is characterized by absolute presence, a kind of plotlessness; when it matters most, the greats know how to inhabit each moment on its own terms, rather than string them together into a fated narrative. The simplicity with which Anunoby sums up his play, is the essence of his excellence. Undistracted by past triumphs or failures, he calmly addresses what the moment demands.

Whereas the spectator—the fan, the analyst, the writer—relives furiously. Between games, and after championships, we rewatch highlights or consume rabid fan theories about what adjustments the team needs to make. We abandon the present wholesale. We get entrenched in narrative. It’s not our fault, really. Language is a synthetic substance that alters its subject, shoehorning a tactile instant not merely into words but into the arc of a sentence with a beginning and end. At which point we have already lost the athlete’s immediacy. 

Wallace briefly allows that there may be a reason for the athlete’s reliance on cliché. In her biography, Austin describes the aftermath of her 1989 car accident, which shattered her knee, bruised her heart, and ended her career at the age of twenty-six. When Austin writes that she “quickly accepted” the consequences of the accident, perhaps she is not failing to testify but successfully being concise. Her banal recap might be “exhaustively descriptive” (his italics) of her mental state under pressure. In fact, he suggests, all of these athletes at their pivotal junctures, amid the overstimulation of the arenas, might be thinking “nothing at all.” 

But it’s not quite true to say that, in these states of heightened presentness, athletes are thinking “nothing.” It’s more that those states are immune to the durational time language demands. Cliché, ready-made and reflexive, offers an instantaneity that, in its own way, distills the basic experience of those enthralling athletic moments. When Jalen Brunson insists that the key is to treat the score like it is 0–0 (a favorite maxim of his), and the fan’s eyes glaze over because that is not the insight they were looking for, some basic truth is still revealed: that pure athletic excellence is plotless; each moment, shorn of story, is more or less the same. The discipline required to treat each second “unburdened by what has been,” to use a new cliché, eludes us spectators, us narrative addicts. But for athletic geniuses, it is ordinary, and only a language so ordinary that it negates itself comes close to conveying that contradiction.

Which is why I remain enchanted by certain perfect refusals: not only Anunoby’s stone-cold shrug-off, but also the moment when the hosts of a Knicks podcast, live streaming the aftermath of that Game Four, blew out their mics, howling and wheezing, leaving only the muffled pulse of what sounded like them rolling around on the floor. 

Or when Brunson, number 11, El Capitan, the king of New York, was asked courtside after the Knicks’ championship victory in San Antonio on Saturday, their first in fifty-three years, “Can you express—this”—here the interviewer waved his hands at the stands—“with half of the city of New York here?” 

“Nah,” said Brunson. He’s right. 

Photograph by Izzy Ampil.

Isabella Cacdac Ampil is a writer with work in The American Scholar, Harper’s, The Drift, The Wall Street Journal, and Pitchfork, among other publications.