Finally, Tuesday would have been the late writer David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday. Although best known for his fiction and his personal essays, Wallace wrote a few incredible pieces of sportswriting. In “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”, a meditation on how elite athletes operate, Wallace included these lines that occasionally come to mind whenever I see a Kobe Bryant or Derrick Rose at the line late in a ballgame: “The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.”
Source: Hunter Felt in NBA: More Linsanity, Miami Heat thrive, and Greg Oden vs. Kevin Durant [archive]