Imperfect
Is perfection still possible?
Conceding the point that no Olympic athlete may ever duplicate Nadia Comaneci’s spectacular performances that garnered perfect 10s – why do Olympic judges gauge performances out of a score they are unwilling to believe as achievable?
Although I like the switch in point totals, there still could be a conceivable perfect performance – if not for the judge’s determination in its impossibility; however, if the judges are determined to believe the maximum limit of their voting system as unattainable, why do they bother holding the athletes to said unachievable mark?
Certainly, I am not the only one who has had the pleasure of taking a class from a teacher who graded out of 100 percentile, yet did not believe the maximum limit was attainable – even explicitly stating so.
I could casually claim it to be hypocrisy, but it’s not: it’s a systematic denial of perfection. Even if you’re willing to grant that perfect is a weighted word, there still should be narrow parameters where it is apropos – like Nadia’s perfect score.
What is more likely than mere recognition of the statistical limits is that there is an additional factor that needs to be combined with a perfect performance for the most stringent judges to recognize it as so. I suspect there has to be an emotional connection that supersedes the performance itself to spur the skeptics into recognizing the work, yet there is no metric for this phantom third factor (or method on how to create it in the first place). The question is: is the current grading metric fair?
I believe the right answer to that question is what spurred the dual scores in gymnastics and grading curves with teachers – a recognition of varying factors in the work – but is there more, which is socially ignored and apparent only when a performance spurs a dramatic effect?
I’m confident we didn’t phase out perfection, but it seems harder to believe in nowadays. To achieve such a moment a person has to eclipse the temporal confinements and make their performance memorable – and not just memorable to them, but to everyone who sees it. Perfection is weighted more now, which explains why scorers of various works are so shy from believing it.
If I had my say, I would say Game 6 of the NBA Finals was perfect. You felt the fans energy and sensed the jubilation of the team despite thousands of miles of separation. The moment transcended the players, but as a Boston fan, I am far less than objective, which leaves me wondering how you pull in the skeptics to seeing a perfect performance.
