It’s a widely held and probably comforting view that sports are driven by “transformative” athletes, a procession of unprecedented individual talents—Pelé, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods—that heroically drag their games to ever-escalating heights. Occasionally these players prompt physical transformations and rule changes, but usually their impact is more nebulous. Jordan never made anyone seriously consider raising the height of the hoop. He just played basketball better and more shrewdly than anyone else, and in doing so, he altered basketball’s cultural footprint, clearing the way for Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, maybe even Andrew Wiggins.
Robert Griffin III, 23 years old with a twice-reconstructed right knee, is, we’re told, one of these transformative athletes. This offseason, Griffin has been the subject of two full-length books, Dave Sheinin’s RG3: The Promise and Ted Kluck’s Robert Griffin III: Athlete, Leader, Believer, and both frame Griffin as an epochal, superhuman talent. “Someday historians may look back at the Redskins’ second play from scrimmage in their win over the Saints and pinpoint it as the moment offensive football changed forever in the NFL,” writes Sheinin. Kluck’s explicitly faith-based book goes even further, offering up RG3 as a sort of Cartesian theological proof: “RG3 and football should remind us of who it is that we really worship. … There’s something in Robert’s game that suggests that God made him to do exactly this, exactly now.” Take that, Tim Tebow.
Griffin was also the focus of a recent hourlong ESPN special that documented his rehabilitation process, his family life, and his insatiable thirst for Gatorade. And in May, Washington fans unearthed Griffin’s wedding registry and showered him and his fiancée with gifts, the sort of desperate affection normally lavished on a coveted free agent or a star player feared to be on the verge of departure. If Sunday football is America’s secular religion, all of this hagiography and breathless devotion has made Griffin seem like some blessed apparition: precious, magical, fleeting. We love him, and because we love him, we can’t stop worrying about him.
via RG3 knee injury: Can Robert Griffin III save the NFL, or will pro football destroy him? – Slate Magazine.
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