Just Saying, Is All... | Greg Oden's Worst Enemy

Mortality hurts.

The hits keep coming for Greg Oden. First it was the knee. Then it was the foot. Now doubters have dubbed him the next Bill Walton, which will only be true to the extent that it’s unfair.

Youth is a state of mind.

Health, on the other hand, begins and ends with the stuff of the body.

Don’t confuse this for an elegy. Oden still has plenty of upside, and the Blazers seem to be in it for the long run. But there’s a reason your insurance agent collects medical histories. If the last two years are any indication, the next decade promises plenty of pain for the Portland faithful.

Toughness can’t be taught.

Worse, wellness can’t be willed.

Even with all the drive in the world, you can’t expect to get very far on a bad set of wheels.

We sports fans want our heroes to be invincible. It’s a sort of escapism, I think, a salve for the strains and sprains of our own Earthly toil. The catch, alas, is that life is no kinder to Lottery picks than it is to the rest of us. In a world where death starts on Draft Day, the aptest avatar is always the one with the limp.

I think, therefore I am.

I age, therefore I ache.

Descartes found shelter in his skull, but no one’s a dualist when dust returns to dust.

Biological evolution is a succession of failures. We are what we are because the prototypes didn’t quite work, and every orthopedist knows the limits of the latest model. Greg Oden’s worst enemy is the process that begat him: the aimless tinkering, the blind design. God made Adam in His own image. The rest of us get our genes from far more fallible fathers.

Hobbled if he plays, heckled if he doesn't—sounds to me like young Greg is caught in a classic Catch-22:

Man was matter, that was Oden's secret. Drop him out the window and he'll fall. Rush him back from injury and he'll break. Deactivate him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Oden's secret.

Because ripeness is never a matter of heart.

And any man who claims to outclass his carcass is either superhuman or only just saying, is all...

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