Of a master plan

It was I, dear reader, who demanded the Recluse throw something up on the blog the minute the solemn word came over the wire. Regardless of who is FreeDarko this or FreeDarko that, if you reduce me to the child I am and ask me why I watch basketball, it's Amare. It's not an overstatement to say that, at least for tonight, this upcoming season has lost some luster for me; though I still firmly believe that Josh Smith could fill his shoes in the objective thrills department, Amare has presence and kinetic charisma unlike anyone else in the league. It isn't just that he makes your jaw drops, your face squelch up, and your mind shatter. Amare Stoudemire is a full-fledged folk hero, the rare talent who seems to have tapped—and exploded—something basic, almost primordial, and hitherto unimaginable in the abstract set of rules, buckets and measurements devised by Naismith some nine hundred years ago.



We didn't have much to say at first, since loss is first met with irrepressible shock, but it was our candle at the vigil, our dumb-founded phone call in search of sorrow's community. Once the news sunk in, and its implications began to seep through my plan for the future, I spied a glimmer of hope on the horizon. In the initial words of my inner comment poster, "Willis Fuckin' McGahee." Amare, quite possibly the most athletic human being in all of history, is certainly a physical specimen on the order of McGahee, whose unprecedented comeback was too freakish, too unsettling, to be transmuted into legend. No, it was the beginning of a new world, the promise of a new kind of man. And Amare, early in his career, in peak condition, is certainly in a position to follow in McGahee's footsteps. For those who have noted that Webber, Houston, and Kidd had the same surgery—Amare, as violently spry as anything the world has ever seen, has prodigious health to spare. He could revive a dying man with the force of his spiritual essence.



I expect a down year from the Sun to end all Suns. Especially with the track record this kind of injury has, no way they rush him back, or even let him near a court before he's ready (like he knows how to play gingerly). But if there is a god (or basketball gods) in the sky, he will not take Amare from us. He would not have put Amare, the most profound statement on the game itself since his Airness, on this earth only to take him from us.

Then I remember, shudder, and tilt my eyes back in my head: "Black Jesus," tattooed on his neck in the year he proved his near-omnipotence, and confirmed the existence of a soul beneath the maelstrom of movement.

And on the other side, "Lord Knows."