A few years ago I was doing a project for a college class and researching NBA data, I was admiring Wilt Chamberlain’s greatness for the first time and realizing the dominance that Stockton and Karl Malone shared with their two man game for roughly 10 years. While going through the data and looking for connections I was struggling to find what I was searching for. The next day in the gym, I was listening to a podcast that featured Michael Phelps. He was talking about what he felt truly separates him from everyone else in that prolific Olympic run he had. From his perspective it was his hypersensitivity to his swimming mechanics and ultimately his entire environment. 

I wondered how that may relate to the greats in the game of Basketball too. Hypersensitivity is defined as one’s reaction to an irregular response but what I think Phelps was really hinting at was his ability to feel and focus on his end goal to a higher degree. I think of athletes like Jordan and Bo Jackson (my personal favorite athlete of all time) and there is definitely something to this hypersensitivity and I think it relates to an athletes innate ability to make the right play at the right time and on a more consistent basis. 

This is also attributed to the athlete’s attention to detail, when coupled with a hypersensitivity fundamentals become easy to repeat and allow for the athlete to focus more on making the play at hand. If we start to think about most respected greats across professional sports and high level competition in general, those that are the superstars are typically those that can read and react to unforeseen circumstances. The ability to be hypersensitive to their environment allows for this freedom of movement to adapt and ultimately let their athleticism show. Some of Michael Jordan’s greatest highlights were purely reactionary like his double clutch fake dunk, finish with the lefty layyyyyy! 

There have been many studies consisting of different VRT scenarios and hand eye coordination tests to try and determine if reaction times in elite athletes differ from everyone else but data always seems to be foggy on the grounds that there is too much variability from gender to gender and across age demographics. It is my opinion that it does play a role to a degree but is hard to compute because of what it means to be “hypersensitive” in each respected sport. For example, two very respected and well known athletes like Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps both had very different types of feels that allowed them to be hypersensitive and react to almost anything in the midst of competition. For Jordan, his innate ability to feel the help defense rotation and understand where the weakness on the floor is also what made him great in addition to his scoring. Phelps on the other hand was more hypersensitive to his environment and technique then anything else. He would actually know his times for the most part without even counting based on the swim strokes he took that race which I found absolutely incredible. This is a testament to his attention to detail and nothing else.