Trio who tempt us to search for genius
CHRIS HEWETT
What do we mean when we talk of genius? It is a question as old as Noah, an early candidate for G-word status after floating his stock while everyone else was heading into liquidation, and is asked anew in sporting circles every time a rugby player, a footballer, a cricketer or a Greco-Roman wrestler does something out of the ordinary.
This time last week, we found ourselves smack in the middle of “genius central”. Apparently, Jude Bellingham’s equalising goal for England against the mighty Slovakia – the “overtime overhead” – was so utterly world-changing, it knocked the splitting of the atom into a cocked hat. Suryakumar Yadav’s boundary catch for India in the World T20 final? Never seen anything like it, ever. “The greatest in cricket history,” pronounced one broadcaster, who may or may not have been sacked for gratuitous understatement.
And then there was our very own Antoine Dupont, who, for the avoidance of doubt, belongs to all of us who love our rugby, not just the French. His all-round contribution to the Toulouse cause in their championship decider against Bordeaux-Begles was off the scale, once again. The day he delivers a performance that is merely “on” the scale, we will be forced to wonder whether he’s more past it than Joe Biden.
All three players electrified us, no doubt about it, but were their feats really the stuff of genius? This is where we descend into the murk of definition and interpretation.
Without being overly philosophical about it, we might usefully turn to a philosopher in our moment of need. We’re not talking here of front-rank rugby thinkers like Carwyn James or Pierre Villepreux or Brian Ashton, however rich their game-transforming intellects may have been. We’re talking Schopenhauer, and once you’ve stopped sniggering at this prime example of hifalutin pseudery, you might consider one of his more accessible sentences: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
This goes to the heart of it. Bellingham and the man known throughout the cricketing world as SKY showed the highest level of craftsmanship in doing what they did at the crux moments of their respective matches, with their teams teetering on the edge of damaging defeats. But the skills they performed were “closed”, to borrow a word from the coaching lexicon. To put it another way, they had been rehearsed, day after week after season.
Dupont does “closed” as well as anyone and better than most, but he is also doing an awful lot more – things we haven’t seen from any other scrum-half in the sport’s recorded history, including Gareth Edwards and Joost van der Westhuizen and half a dozen other No.9s long cherished as masters of their trade. Most strikingly, he senses possibilities amid the pitch-level frenzy that no one else could spot in a month of Sundays, including those scanning the scene from the grandstand without 17st blindside flankers hunting them down with evil intent. This puts him in an altogether different category. Call it the “genius” category.
Interestingly, the Grand Slam-winning England outside-half Rob Andrew dipped his toe in these deep waters when discussing a certain Jonny Wilkinson, whom he mentored at Newcastle back in the early days of professionalism. “Jonny had all the skills, technically speaking, but he didn’t quite have all the gifts – not in the way (Daniel) Carter had them,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir Rugby: The Game of My Life. “I don’t think he was as naturally gifted in terms of the sport’s unmeasurables and abstractions – the peripheral vision, the instant identification of space…the instinctive recognition of an attacking opportunity.”
He did not mean this as a criticism, still less a disparagement. Quite the opposite. “I prefer to see his career through the prism of commitment, determination and self-sacrifice,” he went on to write. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody push themselves to the limit in pursuit of a set of objectives, both personal and team-wise. Has anyone ever squeezed more from their reserve of talent? He showed a fidelity to his work that went way beyond the call of duty.”
Does this mean that true genius must come easily and that the wellworn one per cent inspiration/99 per cent perspiration equation is plain wrong? Surely not. However uncommonly blessed the once-in-aforever players – the Phil Bennetts and Serge Blancos, the Tim Horans and Michael Joneses – may have been, they didn’t just rock up to the house and play it down. Rather than launch themselves into the clouds from a horizontal position on the sunbed, they did all unglamourous sweat-of-the-brow stuff, and then did some more. Ditto Dupont.
The bottom line? We use the G-word too freely. The celebrated American quarterback Joe Theismann made this point when he said: “Nobody in football should be called a genius.” Notoriously, he didn’t stop there, adding: “A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.” Some thought he was being serious; others insisted there really was a Norman Einstein who happened to be phenomenally bright. Either way, it was a cracking comment, bordering on…
