Values of the Game (2 page)

“Do you like the law?”

“It’s okay. But it’s nothing like playing the trumpet.”

In Crystal City, Missouri, when I was growing up, my basketball heroes were Bob Pettit, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jerry West. When I was fourteen, I went to a week-long basketball camp run by Easy Ed Macauley, a forward for the St. Louis Hawks who had returned to his hometown in a trade (an epochal one, it turns out) that sent Bill Russell to the Boston Celtics. Macauley and his staff gave morning lectures on proper attitude and other aspects of basketball, and at one of these lectures he said, “If you’re not practicing, just remember—someone, somewhere, is practicing, and when you two meet, given roughly equal ability, he will win.” Those words made a deep impression on me. I decided I never wanted to lose simply because I hadn’t made the effort, and I intensified an already intense routine.

Beginning that year and all through high school, I practiced from June to September, four days a week, three hours a day; from September to March, I practiced three to four hours a day Monday through Friday and five hours a day on Saturday and Sunday. In the fall, before basketball season began, I ran along streets in town, through fields, over railroad tracks, down to the banks of the Mississippi and back. To improve my vertical leap, I wore weights in my shoes and jumped to touch the rim for four sets of fifteen jumps each, with alternating hands. I practiced dribbling by wearing plastic glasses that prevented me from looking down at the ball and forced me to keep my eyes on the court ahead of me. I formed an obstacle course with the gym’s metal folding chairs, weaving among them with a crossover dribble. I stacked chairs in towers to practice shooting hook shots over an imaginary seven-footer. Alone in the gym, I made moves to the baseline, reverse-pivoted back toward the lane, gave a head fake, then changed the ball from one hand to the other for the layup. I shot set shots and then jump shots from five different places on the floor, with the backspin often bringing the ball back to me as if it were a yo-yo on a string. I kept shooting until I had hit twenty-five in a row from each spot with the set shot and twenty-five in a row with the jump shot. If I missed number twenty-three, I started over. And above all, I played wherever there was a good game, sometimes driving twice a day to St. Louis during the summer for pickup scrimmages. When a fifteen-year-old female classmate telephoned one night to flirt, I somewhat doltishly protested that my real girlfriend was basketball.

In retrospect, I think I probably spent an excessive amount of time in the gym during those years, but the by-product of those countless hours of practice was a self-discipline that carried over into every aspect of my life. My freshman year at Princeton was a struggle academically. Many of my classmates were from prep schools and had essentially covered the first year’s classwork the year before; I was from a small-town high school in the Midwest and Ivy League standards were new to me and very, very difficult. Spring midterms went badly, so I quit freshman baseball—my second sport—and virtually lived in the library. I barely made it through that first year, but by my senior year, having kept up the work pattern I established out of necessity as a freshman, I achieved a respectable record.

In the U.S. Senate, along the campaign trail, or on any number of projects I became involved with after Princeton, it was the same story. I was determined that no one would outwork me. Basketball had lit that fire, and it burned in many directions. As I grew older and met my basketball heroes, and even defeated some of them, I realized that my way of doing things was not at all unique. Most of the pros had developed their skills by paying their dues in practice time. The biggest myth in basketball is that of the “natural player.” Remember that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school team.

The need for discipline applies first to conditioning. It’s painful and grueling, but there’s no alternative. You can’t lead the fast break or tear down 20 rebounds a game if you can’t run and jump without fatigue. Getting into shape and pushing the body to new levels every day is a mental activity. When you believe that you can’t do another lap or another push-up or another abdominal crunch, your mind forces you to go ahead. When your wind is short and you have a pain in your side from running, only your mind can get you to withstand the pain and go on. As UCLA’s legendary coach John Wooden says, “Nothing will work unless you do.”

I used to hate getting into shape no matter which routines I followed—laps, line drills, playing one on one full court, running the floor while passing the ball back and forth with two teammates. After six weeks of agony, during which every part of my body ached so badly that many mornings I crawled from bed to bathroom to soak in a hot tub, the pain began to diminish and the muscles started to come around. When you train seriously for basketball, you learn the difference between getting into condition and
getting into condition.
In the lesser of those two states, you can run up and down the floor and do what you have to do without the interference of fatigue. But you’re not really in peak condition until you can cruise when others push. When your body is honed, you can run your opponents around and around, with little immediate purpose beyond tiring them out, making them angry, or distracting them from any defensive concentration. My toughest opponent, John Havlicek of the Boston Celtics, was a true genius when it came to using conditioning as a weapon. His goal was to get his opponent to give up, to stop overcoming fatigue, to stop pushing himself. Havlicek saw it as a matter of who gives up first. “You’ll pass out before you’re overworked, but most people don’t know that,” he once told Orlando Magic senior executive vice president Pat Williams. “They think they’re overworked, so they stop. They could have kept going, but they didn’t. They weren’t beat physically; they were beat mentally.”

Skill development comes next. The critical years are in high school, and the real preparation begins when the season ends. Off-season is when major leaps occur in a high school player’s abilities, when you develop the crossover dribble, the reverse pivot, and opposite-hand shooting.

The only way to become a shooter is by shooting—not only in scrimmages but alone. It’s like learning to walk: Once babies master the basics, they no longer have to think about “how” to walk. The same is true of shooting. Once you’ve mastered your techniques and found your rhythm, you never lose them. They become your individual basketball signature. As you grow older, your legs can go bad and running will become more difficult, but you never lose the shooting. It may be harder to get into position to take the shots, but to hit them shouldn’t be a struggle. Then again, if you don’t have the will to get the shot down—to do it over and over—you’ll never be a shooter at all.

The great thing about discipline is that you can get immediate returns on your investment of time and effort: The harder you work, the sooner your skills improve. Then the virtuous circle takes over. As your skills grow, you get a rush of self-confidence, which spurs you to continue working, and your skills increase all the faster. Practice pays off more when you concentrate while you’re doing it. But that’s harder than it sounds. In shooting practice, there’s no crowd; sometimes it’s just you, the ball, and the basket. In order to hit twenty-five in a row in high school, I had to concentrate, think about what I was doing, and get the feel for all the elements involved—the legs, the elbow, the follow-through. My mind was focused on each attempt. I was grooving my shot.

By the time I was twenty-one, total involvement in shooting practice was more difficult. I had to reduce the number of consecutive shots to fifteen in a row, and by the time I was thirty-three, I couldn’t force myself to do more than ten out of thirteen. While it was true that after twenty years of practice I knew what I was doing technically, I also found my mind wandering in the midst of the routine—to the day’s headlines, to a comment a friend had made, to anything but shooting. As a result, I couldn’t hit practice shots as consistently as I had in high school and college. That realization was part of what told me it was time to quit.

As difficult as individual discipline is, it pales next to team demands. Hitting the open man with the pass and staying with a pattern or play until its conclusion require uncommon self-control. It takes real character to derive enjoyment from the pass that leads to the pass that leads to the basket. If one player fails to make the interim pass, to block out for a rebound, or to take the open shot, it affects the whole team. Coach Jerry Sloan’s Utah Jazz and Pat Summitt’s Tennessee Lady Vols epitomize seamless team offense.

A man-to-man defense requires team discipline too. There’s no such thing as “I stopped my man” if three other opposing players scored at will. When a player goes for a steal and misses, his teammates have to pick up his man quickly. When a player covers for the teammate making the steal attempt, another teammate has to move over and cover for the one helping the stealer. A willingness to make yourself vulnerable to catcalls from the fans if your man scores while you are helping your teammates is the ultimate test of a disciplined team defense.

Determination sits at the core of discipline, and the will to excel sits at the core of determination. You don’t have to be a pro to learn that lesson from basketball. When I failed as a rookie guard in the NBA, my desire to succeed placed a resolute grid of practice over my entire off-season. I had known in high school and college how it felt to be regarded as the best. I preferred that feeling to the sense of failure I had after my first pro year. Only later did I realize that I had worked all summer not just to hone my skills but to regain my self-respect.

In 1973, the Knicks played the Celtics for the NBA Eastern Conference Championship. We lost the sixth game, in New York, sending the final game back to Boston, where the Celtics had never lost the seventh game of a playoff—ever. The day before the game, Ned Irish, the president of the Knicks, made one of his very rare appearances at practice. He said, partly in anger and partly out of calculation, that we should be ashamed of ourselves, that we had had a great year within our grasp but had thrown it all away the night before. He ended by saying that we didn’t have much of a chance in Boston. Some teams would have quit on themselves at this point, but Irish’s scathing commentary fired us up. The next day we played one of our best-disciplined defensive games, and we won not only the game but the NBA championship that year as well.

Learning the discipline it takes to succeed in basketball teaches a fine appreciation for how hard you have to work. The difficulty of preparation contributes to the sense of triumph. As Lao-tzu put it, “Mastery of others is strength; mastery of yourself is true power.” When you overcome adversity with self-discipline and you win a hard-fought battle, the elation explodes. There are few things in life better than that.

Part of the beauty and mystery of basketball rests in the variety of its team requirements. Championships are not won unless a team has forged a high degree of unity, attainable only through the selflessness of each of its players. It is in the moves that the uninitiated often don’t see that the sport has its deepest currents: the perfect screen, the purposeful movement away from the ball, the well-executed boxout, the deflected pass. Statistics don’t always measure teamwork; holding the person you’re guarding scoreless doesn’t show up in your stats. But when you’re “taking care of business,” you’re working to produce a championship team, and “We won” comes to mean more and lasts longer than the ephemeral “I scored.” Solidarity becomes an essential part of your professionalism.

The society we live in glorifies individualism, what Ross Perot used to champion with the expression “eagles don’t flock.” Basketball teaches a different lesson: that untrammeled individualism destroys the chance for achieving victory. Players must have sufficient self-knowledge to take the long view—to see that what any one player can do alone will never equal what a team can do together.

All players, even the greatest, sometimes get out of sync with the rhythm and purpose of the team. By the time Michael Jordan came back to basketball from his year of baseball, the Chicago Bulls had hired nine new players. Michael didn’t have time to synchronize his game with theirs. In the 1995 playoffs, he tried to do it all himself, and the new guys were content to watch “The Michael Show.” The result was convincing proof that one man can’t beat five. Usually, the problem on a team is not the one great player trying to shoulder the entire load but the average-to-good player trying to get attention. You see it in high school games, even in college. Most kids want to shoot; not many want to pass. Too few see selflessness as a goal.

Defense is where team basketball begins. When Red Holzman took over as coach of the New York Knicks in the winter of 1967, he made the point clearly by calling twenty-three practices in twenty-three days, and two thirds of that time was taken up by defense. This was his way of bringing some unity to a group of very disparate individuals. “See the ball!” he would shout—in other words, don’t be so absorbed in guarding your own man that you don’t see when a teammate needs assistance guarding his. Phil Jackson had similar concerns when he took over as coach of the Bulls in 1989. By getting his players to keep the ball in sight at the same time they overplayed their men, he was able to move help from the weak side whenever it was needed. Slowly he got them to realize how much better they were as a group when they helped each other. By emphasizing defense as the core strength of the team, he was able to show the other players that Michael Jordan was only one fifth of the effort (even if Jordan’s fifth was spectacular).

There is nothing as exciting in basketball as a team that knows how to apply defensive pressure, either through a full-court press or a trapping half-court press. That’s when offense flows out of defense, when a few steals, turnovers, or intercepted passes can change the whole momentum of a game. The University of Kentucky won the NCAA tournament in 1998 in part because it was a team that knew how to press. During the 1970 championship season, in a regular season game against the Cincinnati Royals, the Knicks were behind 5 points with seventeen seconds to go in the fourth quarter. Willis Reed hit two foul shots. Suddenly DeBusschere intercepted an inbounds pass and dunked the ball for 2 points. Then Frazier recovered a loose ball, was fouled, and hit two foul shots for our eighteenth win in a row.