Exits: The pact of performance
The upper limit on Joel Embiid's fallibility, and how discourse severs person from body.
What’s our patience, our upper limit, for fallibility?
I know for ourselves it’s endless and if you’re hard on yourself, close to endless. I mean in other people.
Factors of course include who the forgiveness is for and the size of perceived sleight. Does it require a brief conversation, or a reckoning? Will it be settled by proximity, that is, just being in somebody’s orbit again? Will time taper the most offended and hurt feelings? Or will time, stewing, make it worse?
Other factors: Patience straining when we’re short on time and energy, when discord in our daily lives tunnel-visions our capacity for shortcomings and forgiveness, when a grim mood chews up the runway of our benevolence. I can recognize when I scroll past something that makes me feel badly, about myself or the world, the state of it, and I let that feeling settle like a stubborn murk over what I’m doing or a conversation I’m having, but recognition, while helpful, also feels like proudly watching the horse gallop away from the barn. The door was already wide open.
High-level, these are the parameters we carry around and lay atop our own lives and the people in them when there are mistakes, lapses in judgement and care. I point them out to show that leniency is less a muscle than it is an entire environment — interior and external forces always shaping it.
Why, then, do we insist on a vacuum with athletes? A sterile setting that fallibility can’t enter and if it does, spreads like contagion.
“I think that discourses do actually live in bodies. They lodge in bodies; bodies in fact carry discourses as part of their own lifeblood. And nobody can survive without, in some sense, being carried by discourse.” — Judith Butler
Joel Embiid, I forget, might’ve gone blind in spring 2018. Just before the postseason started, his left frontal orbital bone collided with then-teammate, Markelle Fultz, specifically Fultz’s shoulder, when he dashed in to try and grab a loose ball. Embiid spun away, covering his eye, the same eye he’d injured during his one year at Kansas. When Embiid returned for the playoffs he did it in a full face mask made of carbon fibre filaments and polypropylene, materials more or less indestructible in or outside a basketball context, the threat to his sight was so great. He suffered another orbital fracture, this time to the right eye, almost exactly four years later, when, on a drive to the basket, Pascal Siakam caught Embiid’s eye socket with his elbow.
That’s all just for one part of his face. Embiid’s also torn his meniscus, had his thumb hanging on by a ligament thread, suffered a badly sprained ankle and been tormented by ongoing tendinitis and still, only missed eight out of his 67 career playoff games.
This is resiliency, not fallibility, but it’s resiliency overridden by context.
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