Values of the Game

by Bill Bradley

  Dr. J had been there before. In 1977, the 76ers had had a very good chance to win the NBA title, but their team dynamics collapsed around them in the finals against the Portland Trail Blazers. When Dr. J wanted to pass, no one moved to the open spot to receive it. When Dr. J moved without the ball, no one hit him with a pass at a place where he had room to “operate.” The Sixers played as if they were in parallel worlds, equidistant from one another, guaranteed never to touch. I felt that the core of the problem was an apparent conflict between forward George McGinnis and Dr. J. A prolific scorer himself, McGinnis seemed to want equal billing. This off-court problem became an on-court one. Now I wondered whether the addition of Moses Malone would be a replay of that situation. But to the relief of coach Billy Cunningham and general manager Pat Williams, Malone asserted at the opening press conference that the Sixers were Dr. J’s team and that he was there to help the forward win his first title. He proceeded to do just that, unselfishly playing his heart out the entire season, rebounding relentlessly, and adding the missing ingredient to a good Philadelphia team that became a championship Philadelphia team.

  The part of personal responsibility that’s least appreciated is mental preparation. Every player has a different approach. For some, the pregame ritual consists of shooting the same number of minutes the day of the game, eating the same meal, listening to the same music, phoning the same group of people. Others switch themselves on only an hour or so before tipoff, able quickly to concentrate as they tape their ankles, put on their uniform, and do some stretching exercises.

  Part of the purpose of the concentration is to get your mind to push your body to its highest possible performance. Bill Russell used to work himself up so much that he would vomit before nearly every game. For high school and college players, there is no excuse for not being “up for the game.” They play a limited number of times a year, and the years of competition are finite. In the pros, where you can play over a hundred contests a year, it’s more difficult to be up for each one of them. Injuries intervene, fatigue deadens anticipation, opponent quality varies. The essential requirement for victory is that there always be a teammate to pick up the slack. On great teams, someone always steps up. That way, the team continues to win. When you lose because you haven’t made the mental effort, you have no one to blame but yourself.

  “MEETING WITH TRIUMPH AND DISASTER”

  RESILIENCE

  Basketball is a laboratory for learning how to handle adversity, which comes in many forms—obvious ones, like injury or defeat, and less tangible ones, like the crowd’s contempt or the lengthening of an opponent’s lead. Adversity offers a richness of experience all its own, and even victory has pitfalls. Rudyard Kipling told us to “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” Unfortunately most of us can’t do that. We allow defeat to crush us, or we exult unrealistically in victory.

  For me, learning to cope with defeat was not easy. From the time I was in high school, I used to turn a basketball loss over and over in my mind, asking myself what I and others could have done differently. Often I replayed the game so relentlessly that it would interfere with my sleep. The loss hung for days, like a fog: Other people offered analyses, the coach had his interpretations and injunctions, but it took days of practice and the prospect of another game to get a defeat fully behind me.

  That pattern continued until my second year in the NBA. I had just made the Knicks starting team as a forward, and we had lost a close one in Philadelphia on a bad pass I made when the Sixers were applying a full-court press. After the game, I was dejected. Back at the hotel, Dave DeBusschere, an experienced pro who had joined the team two months earlier and was my new roommate, put me straight: “You can’t go through a season like this. There are too many games. Sure, you blew it tonight, but when it’s over, it’s over. Let it go. Otherwise you won’t be ready to play tomorrow night.” That piece of advice helped change my whole attitude. Even a good pro team is going to lose twenty games a year. I realized that the more you carry the bad past around with you in the present, the less likely it is that the future will improve.

  Victory is the more subtle impostor. When you begin to expect it as a continuum instead of seeing it as a reward that has to be fought for, you’re in trouble. Julius Erving once said that sustaining focus after a failure isn’t a problem—indeed, it might even sharpen your alertness because you’d be intent on making up for the mistake. It’s after you’ve pulled off a great play that focus is difficult, because there’s “a strong temptation to dwell on what you just did.” By the time you finish congratulating yourself, your opponent has scored three baskets.

  The ultimate danger of being victorious is losing sight of how you got there. Only a few teams in the NBA have repeated as champions. As Bill Russell puts it: “It’s easier to become Number One than it is to stay Number One.” Somewhere along the line, most teams fail to prepare themselves for the season following a championship. The fault can be mental, as in the lessening of the desire to win, or physical, as in reporting to training camp overweight or undertrained. Occasionally jealousy among players about who got what rewards out of the last year’s championship can eat away at team unity.

  Bouncing back from both victory and defeat requires a reservoir of self-knowledge. Making adjustments in your playing style is sometimes wise, but altering what you believe about the game in order to break a skid will never work. Nearly every day Phil Jackson puts on the chalkboard a clearly defined set of offensive principles: Provide proper spacing, penetrate the defense, ensure player and ball movement with a purpose, provide strong rebounding position and good defensive balance on all shots, and so on. A set of principles allows a coach’s criticism to be less personal and each player’s performance to be measured against the team mission. If your game is guided that way, it’s easier to be consistent. Otherwise, you’re just reacting—to helpful friends or critical sportswriters, all with their own ideas about how you won or what went wrong. While it’s a good idea to take praise in the press with a grain of salt, it’s also wise to listen to the criticism and determine whether or not it’s merited. If it’s not, treat it just like the praise.

  There’s also a need for such a thing as resilience within a game. In most contests, there are good and bad moments; the flow is inevitable. Yet some players, and some teams, can’t seem to come back from a bad break. When a team makes a few dumb plays or gets a few bad calls, its play often deteriorates. Teammates will glare at each other; occasionally, hostile words will pass between them. By the fourth quarter, they’re starting to prepare their postgame excuses. Defeat is inevitable. When things go bad for such teams, no one steps in to change the momentum, and then they get even worse.

  There is no greater tonic for team morale than a come-from-behind victory; it’s the core of team resilience. In 1972, the Knicks fell 19 points behind Milwaukee in a game with six minutes to go, yet we won. When our team hit a few shots while holding the Bucks scoreless, the crowd in Madison Square Garden began to rumble. After a few steals were converted into baskets, the margin dropped to 8 points, and the rumble turned into a roar. By the time we trailed by only 2 points, the roar was deafening. By the end of the game, which we won, people were shouting, “I believe! I believe!” convinced that we could overcome any obstacle, surmount any lead.

  That belief has remarkable power. Combined with trust in your teammates, it can have a dramatic psychological effect on your opponents. It becomes a part of your team’s reputation. Once that happens, no opposing team ever feels safe, no matter how great a lead it has. More important, your team knows it will be in every game until the very end.

  Comeback stories, examples of tenacity under pressure, provide a model for beating the odds. They become part of the collective imagination, and they are drawn on in countless situations by people in all walks of life. The stories tell us never to give up—that failure can turn to success, that misfortune can be overcome, that the human spirit is indo
mitable, and that all of us are stronger working with one another than we are working alone.

  In basketball, there is no misfortune greater than injury. A player’s career can end with one twist of the knee or ankle. In few other activities is such finality so closely wedded to such physical virtuosity. While most injuries are temporary, the healing process isn’t complete until the player returns to the game. When you are injured, your first thought is “How soon can I play again?”—followed by fear that the answer is “Never.”

  The very thought that injury can end a career focuses your energy in a peculiar way. When you’re recuperating, life looks different. It did for me in 1961, in the summer after my senior year in high school. I had broken my foot in a baseball game, and as I sat with it in a cast I contemplated a world without basketball. Where would I go to college if there was to be no more basketball? A few weeks after I posed that question to myself, I decided not to go to Duke, where I had accepted an athletic scholarship, but to enroll instead at Princeton, where I had none. If I hadn’t injured my foot, I might never have made the switch.

  Amy Cook is the daughter of a friend of mine. Her father was a high school track coach, whose teams had won six state championships. His greatest satisfaction, however, came from seeing his daughter grow up to be a great 100-meter high hurdler. In her sophomore year in high school, she had the fastest recorded time in the state of Missouri and won second place in the state championship. Then, in the winter of her junior year, she tore her anterior cruciate ligament during the district basketball finals. She had surgery and reconstruction of the knee joint. The doctors said that it was uncertain if she would ever run again. The cast stayed on for eight weeks and then she began the rehabilitation—the weight clinic, the stretches, the jogging—hoping to get ready for her senior year season. Her parents accompanied her every morning to her 6:30 workouts. She returned to competition in March of her senior year, but she didn’t do well. Sometimes she couldn’t even finish a race because of the pain. She barely qualified for the state championships—and as she and her father drove to Jefferson City for the state meet, they knew they had both done everything they possibly could to prepare her for the event. When the runners took their mark, Amy’s father was close to tears, afraid that his daughter would be crushed by a poor performance. The gun went off and Amy jumped out ahead, holding the lead to the finish.

  Amy Cook was the state champion. She had reached deep into herself and found the confidence and drive that enabled her to win. It was partly physical—she had done everything she could to get ready. It was partly mental—she had prepared herself to risk everything in order to win. But it was her resilience that put her over the top.

  A part of being resilient is understanding that there are some things in life that can never be gotten over, no matter how many games are under your belt. I felt sad on many levels on November 7, 1991, when Magic Johnson reported to the world that he was infected with HIV. I mourned the loss to the game. Yet Magic’s terrible misfortune reminds us that each of us harbors self-destructive impulses and urges, along with all the qualities we’re proudest of. By standing up in public and telling young people, “Don’t make the mistakes I made,” Magic shed some light on a part of our human nature that is too often hidden. For that gift from him, we must be grateful.

  It may be that by accepting the limits to resilience we can celebrate it, using it when we can and cherishing it while it lasts. I’ve made it through more than a few tough moments in my life by drawing on the resources of my basketball years. Resilience is what allows us to struggle hard and long with tragedy or loss or misfortune or change and still manage to dig deep and find our second wind. It is a kind of toughness. Each life blow no longer shatters us like a hammer hitting brick; rather, it makes us stronger. It tempers us, like a hammer hitting metal. Imagine the comfort in knowing that by never giving up, by accepting the bad breaks and going on, you will have lived life to the fullest, and maybe will have lived it a little longer. Such peace of mind is often reward enough.

  DREAMING UP THE GAME

  IMAGINATION

  The innovators in basketball came upon their ideas through trial and error, by playing the game. Hank Luisetti of Stanford was the first player to shoot with one hand; before that, all basketball shots except the layup and the hook were two-handed. Joe Fulks of the Philadelphia Warriors concluded that he could get the edge on his opponent if he jumped and shot the ball from the top of his leap, and the jump shot was born. In the 1950s, Bob Cousy began passing the ball behind his back. He was considered a hot dog by traditionalists, but like most innovators he persisted because he believed in his idea—besides, the crowds loved it. Gradually, coaches saw that the efficiency and deceptiveness of the move paid off in easier baskets for teammates. About that time, Elgin Baylor entered the pro ranks. Baylor’s tremendous leaping ability allowed him to combine the jump shot and layup; he was the first player who seemed to hang in air, defying gravity. Julius Erving and Michael Jordan are his direct descendants. Even kids with no leaping ability (myself included—the joke on the Knicks was that my peak leap equaled the thickness of a Sunday New York Times) tried to imitate Elgin as he moved around the basket, altering his shot by changing the ball from hand to hand and using the rim on layups to block his defender’s attempt to reach the ball.

  Innovation took place mainly on offense until Bill Russell and K. C. Jones arrived on the scene in the mid-fifties. As teammates on consecutive national championship teams at the University of San Francisco, and then on the Celtics championship teams, they changed the meaning of defense in basketball. Before them, it was like counterpunching in boxing: The offense would make a move and the defense would respond to it. Russell and Jones forced the offense to react. “K. C. thought differently,” Russell wrote in his book, Second Wind:

  “He was always figuring ways he could make the opponent take the shot he wanted him to take when he wanted him to take it, from the place he wanted the man to shoot. Often during games, he would pretend to stumble into my man while letting the player he was guarding have a free drive to the basket with the ball, knowing that I could block the shot and take the ball away. Or, he’d let a man have an outside shot from just beyond the perimeter of his effectiveness and, instead of harassing the player, would take off down the court, figuring that I’d get the rebound and throw him a long pass for an easy basket.”

  Russell in particular was a master of invention. Having concluded that horizontal lines defined the game better than vertical ones (notwithstanding the fact that more and more players were jumping higher), he was always conscious of the angle at which he did anything on the court. If he had to block a shot from behind on a man streaking for a breakaway layup, he would take a step to the left so that he could come from behind at an angle that would allow his left arm to block the shot and his body to land to the shooter’s right, thereby avoiding the collision that would have earned him a foul. If he was attempting to block a jump shot, he tried to do it during the first foot of the ball’s arc, which meant that his body had to be close to the shooter’s body in the air; and he used a vertical leap with outstretched arms because that created fewer fouls than a leap forward, which would have carried his body into the shooter. He also knew that while a blocked shot pleases the crowd, it is only half the story; the other half is giving your team control of the ball. So when he blocked a shot, his aim was to bat the ball not into the crowd or against the backboard but to a teammate so that the fast break could begin.

  Russell also pointed out that over 60 percent of rebounds occur below the rim, which means that positioning is more important than leaping ability. Knowing where a particular player’s shot usually bounces allows you to anticipate where to be. Boxing out far enough from the basket increases the area you can reach whenever the ball caroms off the rim. Starting under the basket and backing (or assing) your opponent out toward the foul line can surprise him and create a similar space to gather in a rebound. More than any other pl
ayer then or since, Russell mastered the game’s mental aspects, but other great rebounders—Paul Silas, Dave DeBusschere, Moses Malone, Dennis Rodman, Jayson Williams—also understand the subtlety of the art.

  The most dramatic sports innovation I can recall was introduced by the high jumper Dick Fosbury in 1968, when he turned on his back going over the bar instead of going over stomach down, which was the conventional approach. “I was told over and over again that I would never be successful, that I was not going to be competitive and the technique was simply not going to work,” he said to a reporter after winning the gold medal at the Mexico City Olympics. “All I could do was shrug and say, ‘We’ll just have to see.’” The artist, the scientist in the lab, the technologist with a hunch develop ideas that change the world forever. These sports innovators remind us anew that one person can make a difference—and has, time and time again.

  Some players demonstrate a creative imagination in maximizing their modest skills. One of my teammates once said to me half jokingly, “You know, Bill, you’re the best player in the NBA—from your wrist to the tip of your fingers.” He meant that I had good hands, hands that got to a lot of places quickly. Often you can block an opponent’s shot by sticking your hand into the area where he brings the ball up from a dribble for the shot, a move called “stripping him.” When the Knicks played a team with a big center, I would often drop off my man and double team the center when he got the ball. More than a few times, while I was still facing the man I was guarding, I would reach back with my swatting hand and knock the ball loose from the center’s grip. At a minimum I clogged up the area so that the center had less room to make his move.

  Having good hands on offense means that you can catch a pass, make a pass, catch and flick a pass at will. In shooting, good hands help to produce a quick release—the speed with which you move the ball from where you received it to shooting position. Beyond good hands, really great passers have a kind of sixth sense that is spatial and rooted in superb eye-hand coordination and unusual peripheral and depth vision. And really great shooters plant their feet so that they have balance when they receive the ball. Imagination flows into your game when you devise your own ways of combining quick hands, good eyes, and good feet.