Talking with some fellow Illinois fans not that long ago, they mentioned that they were hoping the Illini basketball team could land recruits Jabari Parker, Thomas Hamilton, Jr., and Alex Foster, each of whom, one fan assured me, has a "ridiculous upside potential."
I'm sure they do. I'm also sure that a Google search shows them to be incoming high school freshman who have never played a second of high school basketball.
It's by no means an isolated situation, nor a new one. Routinely, we're finding athletes at younger ages, especially in basketball, always on the look out for the next LeBron, the next Kobe, or the next Garnett.
It's not just there. Sidney Crosby, Justin Upton, Bryce Harper, and Freddy Adu come to mind. So do the drafts every year, and the joke that when two athletes spawn a shoe company cuts the umbilical cord.
Sports hypersters find themselves writing in the future tense. Whereas writers of great fiction, history, and the sciences write in the past and journalists in the present, the sports pundits flood their sentences with "will," the expletive that makes Mel Kiper sound like Nostradamus every year.
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