He dominated in San Antonio, he won by becoming a star and defusing those of others. He did it in a simple way like his clothes, falsely disinterested, exploiting trajectories and movements unknown to others
Tim Duncan turns fifty today. It is a figure that sounds almost incongruous for those who have fixed it in their memory as a permanent presence: straight back, black knee pads, impassive expression, the hand raised to call a play and then that “forty degree” shot at the scoreboard that seemed to come out of a geometry manual, rather than an NBA match: each trajectory as if it were conceived in flat two-dimensional and three-dimensional space through a gaze that synthesized hypothesis and deduction. To describe his greatness we must start not from a paradox but from a real misunderstanding: for almost his entire career he was described as “simple”, assuming that the definition made sense. It was a “lazy” compliment, the most obvious and cheap one could pay to a player who had shown himself to be technically very sophisticated since his college years. Tim Duncan wasn’t someone who did simple things on the court. It made simple plays appear extremely elaborate, which was a whole other concept, embodied only by the few who are part of the small elite of champions. Even more: epochal champions.
