The genius was, and to some extent continues to be, the Romantic hero, the loner, the eccentric, the apotheosis of the individual. Genius is fundamentally an eighteenth-century concept, though it has had a good long run through the centuries since. What is a genius, anyway? And why does our culture have such an obsession with the word and with the idea? But "genius" appears marked for special inflation, so much so that the term "overrated genius" has begun to seem like a tautology rather than a cautious qualification. We live in a time in which all terms and traits are inflated, and even the standard size at Starbucks is a tall. And as Belichick's father, a ripe eighty-three years old (and himself a former coach), took time out to observe, "genius" seemed an odd appellation for "somebody who walks up and down a football field." The Rams' coach, Mike Martz, was touted as an "offensive genius," the Washington Redskins' newly designated coach, Steve Spurrier, as a "genius strategist," and so on through a parade of sports pages, until even the TV commentators began to call for an end to the hyperbole. of a nuclear physicist."īelichick was hardly alone in this peculiar species of gridiron celebrity. Coach Belichick was likened to a "neighborhood tough guy in a dark alley" who "also has the I.Q. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl, the New York Times headline for the Boston edition, in sixty-point type, read simply "DEFENSIVE GENIUS." The text of the article made it clear that this figure of speech had taken hold.
BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE BEAUTIFUL PROBLEMS GENUIS FULL
During the unexpected and glorious ascendancy of the New England Patriots to pre-eminence in the football world last season, the press was full of the word "genius." As a sports reporter for The Boston Globe noted, a computer search had matched "genius" with the Patriots' coach, Bill Belichick, "not once, but more than 200 times." And when the Pats actually defeated the heavily favored St.
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