A while back, I corresponded with a bunch of futurists about what sports would look like decades from now.
Lillard is standing on an empty court in his Milwaukee uniform. There’s crowd murmur in the background. Athletes cost a lot of money, have a tendency to break down and never do exactly what you want them to. They were so busy learning how to hit the corner of the net or catch touchdowns that they often have a poor understanding of dramatic effect. They don’t know what, how or when to say things.
We’ve spent the past half-century training people to accept heroes who are not, strictly speaking, human. On the high-tech end, we can now create people from whole cloth. They may never exist anywhere but on a screen, but that no longer matters. The only people who complained were sports journalists, and not because it’s wrong. We complained because it’s an encroachment on our dwindling professional patch.