the point of the Iverson post

There was actually a more general point to the preceding post on Allen Iverson, though the jet lag hit before I could get to it.

The assumption made by both Simmons and his reader is that there is a basic substance called “athletic talent” that can be poured into any available vessel. Since soccer is not king in the U.S., other sports are currently getting the better athletic talent, while U.S. soccer is stuck with the nation’s second-grade athleticism.

I don’t think I believe it. There are certainly cases of protean talents that can adapt themselves to whatever is available, but I suspect that’s not the norm. (See Michael Jordan’s mediocrity at baseball, which I doubt was a case of simply starting too late in life.)

Try pushing this idea beyond the sphere of sports. Are you really so sure that Shakespeare would have been the greatest novelist of all time if he had lived in the 19th century? This would imply that “literary talent” is a shapeless quantum that can sprout up in the genre of the moment no matter what it is.

It’s an open question, but I tend not to think that “talent” exists in each person in a measurable dose that can be shifted freely to whatever fields are most highly recognized and rewarded at any moment. Instead, I think that individual talent is a subtle and complicated mixture of factors, and some degree of luck in being born in the right time and place is needed.

This came up last week in discussion with a family member. Both of my brothers are tech people, and both are flourishing in the use of technologies less than 20 years old. The question was what they and their professional colleagues would have been doing 30 or 50 years ago, and I’m not sure there’s a unified answer to that. The same holds for those people who now love working on cars– would they have all been working with horses and buggies 200 years ago? Maybe, but it’s far from clear. What probably happens instead is that a new technology taps into a population that had never before been gathered together.

Another example raised in that discussion was the fact that almost all dogs love to stick their heads out the windows of moving cars. Dogs did not have this opportunity 150 years ago, but all of a sudden they all seem to love doing it. So, moving cars plus open windows seems to address something that was already there in dogs but merely sleeping. Yet the same point could be made about individual dogs. The last family dog, for example, loved to eat fortune cookies. But would it make any sense to say that his love for fortune cookies could just as easily have been replaced by some other type of cookie if there had been no Chinese restaurants near where he lived?

I’ll cut this post here before it becomes too diffuse. But the thought taking shape seems to be roughly as follows. Human talent is an extraordinarily subtle thing, and I don’t think you can simply rate certain people as being the most talented, such that they would apply themselves successfully to any task at hand. Certain historical conditions will awaken some talented people while leaving others asleep.

Just as I’m not sure that Shakespeare would have been the greatest novelist in the 19th century, I’m not sure that Kant would have been a great Scholastic philosopher in the 13th century, or that Picasso would have been one of the Italian Renaissance greats. It is possible that some of these scenarios could have been successful, but I think that would be the result of an especially protean or mutable character to a specific talent. And in fact, Picasso is probably a good candidate for that, but I doubt Kant was.

So while I agree with Bill Simmons that it’s easy to imagine Iverson as an international soccer star, the premise of his reader’s letter, though interesting, is probably false.