In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposes a kind of optimal mental state of pure immersion in endeavor, engagement that is not so much a narrowing of focus as a liberation from the nearly infinite imposition of distraction from the task at hand, a sense of lightness and joy even while undertaking challenging work, a condition that I suspect most elite athletes would not require a prestigious academic’s rigorous scholarship to appreciate is analogous with being in the zone. It seems to me, for instance, that former Philadelphia 76er Allen Iverson inadvertently revealed his faith in “flow” over the course of his infamous “Practice?”[ii] philippic, delivered after yet another falling-out with then-head-coach Larry Brown—a man known for his zealous devotion to same. What Iverson knew is what many masters of their crafts have known for a long time: practice, training, self-enhancement can equip you for—or tweak the performance of equipment you already have—those sessions of effortless brilliance, aglide along elevated high-speed lines to what feels like frictionless success[iii], but when you’re in them, practice or training seems utterly small, irrelevant. You already can do anything you want to do. You’ve completed your training, Luke: you are a Jedi Knight.[iv]

Not every contest will provide LeBron with circumstances like the ones he found himself in during Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals or Round 2, Game 6 against the Celtics just this year, but the reality that he’s got those epic demonstrations of ungodly possibility tucked into his waistband, every time he takes the court—without completing the arduous regimen onlookers have demanded he embark on to improve—surely undermines, at least within his own psyche, the sense of urgency, the imperative that he take every game’s crucial shot—or fortify himself ahead of time by doing what is needed to prepare—because he’s got stored on the mental hard disk evidence that he’s already better than the competition, any competition . . . he’s had this evidence since he was roughly ten years old, of course, but the games in question provide indelible proof that can be Witnessed and reWitnessed at many popular video-cache venues on the Net.