Values of the Game

by Bill Bradley

  Sometimes rule changes force innovations in the way the game is played. The 3-point rule is an example. By giving an extra point for a successful shot 23 feet 9 inches or more from the basket, the rule turned the game upside down. Before the 1979–80 season, the objective was to get the easiest shot, as close as possible to the basket. There was a maximum of player movement, with a premium on finesse and team coordination. Now you’re more likely to see a screen-and-roll on one side of the floor, with six players standing far from the basket on the opposite side of the floor. If you don’t get a clear jump shot or a layup off the screen-and-roll, you drive with the ball. If you get nowhere because of a double team, you simply kick it out to a teammate waiting for the ball behind the 3-point line. Too often, strategies are devised to get an open twenty-five-foot shot as much as to get a layup.

  The 3-point rule created a whole new market for good spot shooters—players of average overall skills who could hit the open, standing twenty-five-footer with great regularity: Dell Curry of Charlotte, Steve Kerr of the Chicago Bulls, and Dale Ellis of the Seattle SuperSonics are examples. Since many of my shots as a pro were near that range, people have asked me if I wish I had played when the rule was in effect. My answer is no. What you give up in team movement and finesse is not worth what you get from a few extra points beyond the 3-point line.

  Imagination can also stretch the rules, for basketball is a game of subtle felonies. Referees have a wide latitude in determining whether or not an infraction has taken place. Sometimes they will ignore the rules. For example, you have to dribble the ball with your hand on top or on the side of the ball; if you put your hand under the ball to initiate or continue the dribble, you should be charged with palming or carrying the ball. Now, increasingly in the pros, referees don’t call it. They allow players to palm the ball, particularly on the crossover dribble. That change has allowed players with great quickness, such as Stephon Marbury of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers, to use the crossover move with great effectiveness.

  Players can use their creativity to shape the referee’s interpretation or even to avoid his detection. I can remember the excitement I felt when I was exposed to this game within the game. Jerry West told me how to hook my left hand around an opponent’s leg to get leverage when I whirled around him. Ed Macauley showed me how to place my foot to the side of my man before I received a pass, so that when I got the ball I would have already beaten him by half a step. Macauley also showed me how to maintain awareness of where my man was on defense when I wasn’t looking at him directly: keeping my hands in constant touch with him as if I were reading Braille. I learned by watching Cliff Hagan and Elgin Baylor how to fend off an opponent’s attempt to block your shot by using your free hand to protect the ball from his reach.

  The writer Frank Deford once noted in an article on Boston Celtics swing man Frank Ramsey that about 20 percent of a team’s points in the average game come from free throws. The more you can sucker your opponent into committing fouls, the more points you can add to your team total. Ramsey was full of tricks. He could draw an offensive foul by placing his hand behind his opponent’s back (the hand away from the referee) and pulling him forward so that it would appear that the opponent had intentionally run into him. On defensive rebounds, if his opponent had nudged him under the basket so that he couldn’t get to the ball, he would simply fling up his arms and fail forward, looking for all the world like a man who had been pushed. Often the referee agreed. He also perfected the art of getting an opponent to jump to block an anticipated shot and then leaning into him while he’s suspended helpless in the air so that he grazes you on his way down and your way up for the shot. That way he doesn’t disturb your shot and the referee is likely to call a foul on him. (This was a technique I used to great advantage throughout my college years; in the pros, fewer calls came my way, so I abandoned it.) You see moves like this every day in the college and NBA season—they involve creative deception and challenge the referee’s skills as aggressively as those of the opponent. (Michael Jordan’s heroic last-second shot in the 1998 NBA finals was aided by the clever use of his left hand to nudge Bryon Russell off balance just before Jordan pulled up and hit the shot.)

  Much attention has focused on trash talk in recent years, particularly its ugly and hostile varieties, but using talk to disturb your opponent’s concentration has been around a long time. As a high school player, I used to play a foul-shooting game in which it was permissible to do anything to the shooter except touch him or obstruct his vision. The purpose of shouting at him, making jokes at his expense, and insulting him was to get him to break his concentration, and it was good preparation for the pressures of the game itself. The distinction worth drawing is between flagrant talk for show, which the crowd sees, and subtle talk for results, which it doesn’t see. Talk for results takes many forms, but it usually means trying to rattle your opponent. It could be Sam Jones of the Celtics saying to Wilt Chamberlain, after Wilt failed to block a shot, “Too late, baby!” Or it could be Bill Russell looking at me during a foul shot and then at Satch Sanders, who was guarding me, and saying exasperatedly, “Come on, Satch, don’t let him score!” It could be Michael Jordan saying to a rookie on the opposing team before closing his eyes and making the free throw, “Hey, rook, I bet you can’t do this.” It could be Larry Bird telling his opponent before the game, in the hallway leading to the court, “I think I’m really feeling good tonight. I think I might go for about fifty.” Or Bird, when Michael Jordan in his early years guarded him on a switch, saying, “I got a little one—give me the ball!” Or Bird during one holiday game, scoring on his man and then wishing him a Merry Christmas. Sportswriter Peter DeJonge has written, “What made Bird untouchable was the seamless connection between his dribbling and babbling, as if his tongue were one more incredibly coordinated limb. As he backed his defender down, Bird would matter-of-factly tell him where they were going and what was going to happen when they got there, going on to explain that his being able to do exactly what he wanted, and the defender being helpless to do anything but watch, was the reason for the huge discrepancy in their salaries. In the middle of this combination radio play-by-play and TV color commentary, without any telltale grunt, the ball would be flying toward the basket with the concluding remarks: ‘Don’t even turn around. It’s all net.’”

  Jerry Lucas was another player who understood this aspect of the game. When an opponent shot a free throw, we sometimes signaled a play that called for me to fake a move to the far side of the court and instead receive a pass and take an easy jumper behind a Lucas screen. As I began my move to the other side, Jerry would shout angrily, “Get out of here, Bill! Get the hell to the other side! Go!” My man, hearing this, would retreat a couple of steps in anticipation of my move across court, and then I would quickly step behind the screen for an uncontested shot. Or during a game Jerry and I would converse in gibberish, pretending that we understood each other. “Eee yah see motch eee kah!” I would yell. “Puto rass dee yah!” Lucas would reply. The bewildered defender often would retreat a step, his concentration broken as he tried to anticipate more alternatives than were possible. (What were they saying? It must mean something!) While he was thinking, the ball would go through the basket.

  Sometimes it’s imagination that motivates you in the first place. It enables you to dream. At one time or another, every kid who picks up a basketball pictures himself or herself a court star.

  The basket in my backyard was put up when I was ten years old. A year later, the wooden poles were replaced by a steel pole and a metal fan-shaped backboard. My parents also laid down a twelve-by-sixteen-foot strip of asphalt and put spotlights on the garage so I could practice after it got dark. I felt like a king, presiding over the Cadillac of backyard courts in our small town. When I was in the fifth and sixth grades, you could find me out there every day after school shooting until dinner. In the winter, I’d wear gloves and a wool hat and two sweatshirts. Oc
casionally neighborhood kids would join me in a game of H-O-R-S-E. After a while there’d be enough of us to play a half-court game. Because I was taller than the others, we made it a condition of play that I couldn’t shoot any closer than ten feet from the basket. Backyard one-on-one games were where the juices of competition first rose within me. Pride prevented me from calling a foul against my opponent when he pushed me or hacked my arm. Contact led to more contact, but it stopped short of an exchange of blows. Controlling my temper in such circumstances was just one of the lessons I learned in the backyard.

  Sometimes my mother would come outdoors to challenge me. Not too long ago, I was looking through an old photo album and came across a picture of her, dark-eyed and beautiful, with her shining brown hair pulled back from her face, sitting with her teammates on the 1927 Herculaneum High School basketball team, of which she and her best friend, “Nooks” Dugan, were the unquestioned stars. Twenty years after her high school triumphs, she still considered herself a player, and she still wanted to win when we played one on one. Once when I was in the seventh grade, she gave me a little push going for the steal, and I pushed her back—whereupon, to my horror, she slipped and cracked her skull on the asphalt. I was petrified, but she got up, just smiled, and called it quits—at least for that day.

  I remember the Saturday afternoon in 1958 when the St. Louis Hawks beat the Boston Celtics for the NBA championship. In my mind, I was one of them. I was Bob Pettit shooting the standing jumper, or Cliff Hagan mixing his sweeping hook with reverse layups. Shortly after the game, I went out to the backyard for practice and imagined myself hitting the winning shot. “Four seconds left, three, two—Bradley shoots… it’s good!”

  Nothing unique about that. Thousands of kids all over America, on a winter afternoon at the playground, or out behind the barn, or on the driveway, imagine that they will someday score the winning basket, maybe even in the pros. They sense they may be a step too slow, but then who knows for sure? “It’s dropping today…. Only nets…. Time after time…. One more against the board.” Bong! Swish! Jumper left… swish! Jumper right… swish! Left hook… swish! “Feel the ball in your hands…. Who does know for sure?… Just keep practicing…. Just keep shooting…. Maybe next year, I’ll be a little taller….”

  Inevitably, in those moments of solitary practice, you imagined the voice of your favorite team’s broadcaster. Buddy Blattner covered the St. Louis Hawks, painting vivid word pictures of the game and its players—George “the Bird” Yardley of the Fort Wayne Pistons, Maurice Stokes of Rochester, Sweetwater Clifton of the Knicks, Wilt the Stilt of Philadelphia. Sitting at my desk in my bedroom, I would tune in between, and occasionally during, my various homework assignments. (I sometimes wonder what effect that nonstop crackling play-by-play had on my Latin.) The most famous radio sportscaster of all was Marty Glickman of the New York Knicks, who was also the announcer on the annual Converse All-Star highlights film. More than a few young boys in the fifties fell asleep listening to the transistor under the pillow, lullabied, as the poet Bob Mitchell says, “by the mellifluent tones of the great Marty Glickmanese”:

  Now it’s Braun passing to Dick McGuire,

  Now back to Carl at the top of the key for a two-hand pop:

  Gooooood! Like Nedick’s!

  Yes!

  Now it’s Dolph Schayes getting a pass from Seymour,

  He slices to his right, he drives past Gallatin,

  He lays it up, it’s good and he’s fouled!

  Imagination looks forward when you’re a ten-year-old shooting in the driveway. When you reach an age at which you can no longer play competitively, you start looking back. Basketball, unlike golf or tennis, is only for the young. Unless you don’t mind popping an Achilles tendon, you should retire from the game by age forty. A few old high school stars go longer, but most play only in their memories. Life’s other tasks take over, and for some, like Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, there is nothing else in life that has ever quite matched the feeling you had when you were playing the game before the crowd, when you were young and a star. And then you arrive at an age when you relish life in a new and different way. The sense of lost youth is gone—the challenge now is to make the most of the time left to you—and you can more deeply appreciate the role the game has played in your life. It has become more than just memories; it has become almost an essential part of you.

  Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. Artists, scientists, poets use the power of imagination every day. For those of us who found it in playing the game, it has shaped our joy in countless ways. It has enriched our experience and allowed us to feel the thrill of fresh creation. It puts us in touch with what most makes us human. Above all, it enables us to see beyond the moment, to transcend our circumstances however dire they appear, and to reply to the common wisdom that says we cannot soar by saying, “Just watch!”