When Leonardo da Vinci was painting “The Last Supper,” he would sometimes stare at his work for an hour, make a single stroke, then leave, according to Walter Isaacson’s epic biographical tome. In it, Isaacson wrote that da Vinci told the Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to jell.
“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” da Vinci reportedly said, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
Da Vinci, of course, was an unrelenting perfectionist, a label that could also be applied to Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald in his own creation of a masterful and historic unit.
There is perhaps little in common with the Italian Renaissance man and a finance major with a master’s degree in sports management from the University of Georgia who, upon graduation, accepted a job at an accounting firm. But dig a little deeper and, while the applied trades differ wildly, the genius and strive of da Vinci and Macdonald are not so dissimilar.
And like da Vinci, Macdonald’s genius bubbled to the surface early on.
At Centennial High School in suburban Atlanta, Macdonald was actually better as a baseball player than at football, Xarvia Smith, his former football coach there, told The Baltimore Sun. But the running back and linebacker was able to routinely and quickly break down opponents’ tendencies and pass them on to Smith.
“He picked up my system really fast,” Smith said. “That’s why when he asked about coaching with me later at Cedar Shoals High, I hired him.
“He’s probably the smartest person I’ve met in my life, and I think because he’s so smart and so humble, that allows him to coach in the NFL for a guy who really didn’t play high…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/artistry-chaos-ravens-defensive-coordinator-120000864.html
Author : Baltimore Sun
Publish date : 2024-01-26 12:00:00
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