Mystical or Mundane? ‘Genius’ and the Phenomenology of Creativity in Sport

To be a sporting genius—a ‘great’ even among the upper echelons of sporting cultural history—is an achievement of years of dedication and training. Paradoxically, however, it is widely accepted to entail something more than this—something ethereal and magical. In a similar vein, true creativity in sport is, in part, the result of cultivated practice, yet, paradoxically, it entails elements of spontaneity and originality. Put bluntly, how can creative sporting genius be both (i) original, spontaneous and almost mystical, and (ii) the result of rehearsed practice and therein naturalistically explicable. In this paper, these entwined paradoxes are overcome. Firstly, any account of sporting genius or true creativity must be approached from an existential stance. Once this is done, foundations are laid from which it can be shown that creative genius is irreducible to an individualistic stance. Instead, acts of creative genius manifest within intersubjective domains that are explanatorily necessary. These domains encompass the sporting genius in varying participation with opponents, observers and occasions.