Values of the Game (7 page)

It seems elementary, but abiding by the team rules is another responsibility. Kids who grow up in a chaotic environment often have little sense of time, so arriving at practice at a scheduled hour becomes a major task. The coach who gets across the importance of punctuality introduces order into many a young life. On Red Holzman’s teams, there were few rules, but they were rigid. His attitude was “No excuses—none!” If you weren’t on the bus at the designated time, it left without you. If you didn’t make the plane, you paid your own way. If you were late for practice, even two minutes late, you were fined. The result was that most of us turned up early. Even if you were late because of circumstances clearly beyond your control, you got no sympathy or credit. “Sure, Bill, I know your mother’s cousin called with an emergency that your mother’s nephew couldn’t take care of,” Holzman used to say, “and it rained on the highway and made it slick, after the earthquake damaged the bridge, but still you’re fined.” He smiled and I paid up.

Conditioning, skill development, and following the rules are readily understandable to most players. A player’s responsibilities to the team are more subtle. No player can be a scorer, dribbler, rebounder, and passer to the degree that he or she chooses. The coach has to be clear about your role, but only you can then fill it. You have to fit your talents into the game plan.

Frequently, for the benefit of the team, you have to sacrifice what you would like to do on the court. Scoring 12 points a game and playing your role on a winning team is better than scoring 20 points a game on a losing team. For you to get those 20 points would require a change in team balance and make victory less likely.

In college, I did what I wanted on the court, following my creative impulses to score and generate team movement. In the pros, I had to adjust to playing a defined role. My job was to hit the open shot, move without the ball, push it up the court quickly, pass to the open man, keep my man from getting rebounds, constantly overplay him on defense, and help out if a teammate lost his own man.

Satch Sanders understood that his role on the Boston Celtics of the 1960s was to play tough defense and help rebound, not score. Bob Gross on the 1977 NBA champion Portland Trail Blazers knew that his role was to move without the ball in order to create lanes for passes from Bill Walton to him; to make passes to the guards and lobs to Walton; to set screens against the opposing team’s forwards and guards in order to free up his teammates Maurice Lucas or Lionel Hollins. Jeff Hornacek of the Utah Jazz plays a similar role, throwing his body in front of forwards to draw the charge, screening away to free up a teammate, moving to the open spot for the shot. Probably neither Sanders nor Gross nor Hornacek will ever make the Hall of Fame, but all three assumed responsibility for their roles and were thus absolutely essential to their teams’ victories.

Each player contributes to the team’s off-court chemistry, too, and the results are vital to success. Every team has its subtle personality balance, its mixture of humor and jealousy, its pecking order and center of gravity. On the Knicks, Willis Reed was the boss, the captain. He was the protector during the games and the leader in practice. Everyone acknowledged this. DeBusschere was the other pillar of strength. The rest of us operated within the structure Willis and Dave established. There was a balance of talents and personalities. Dick Barnett was the droll observer of life, able to cut players or celebrities in the news down to size. Earl Monroe provided the ballast that came from a quiet dignity and a willingness to listen to a teammate’s problems. Jerry Lucas, using his prodigious memory, kept score in the yearlong poker game on the road, tabulating who owed what to whom at a particular moment in the year and making sure that money never came between teammates. My off-court role sometimes involved taking aside a white rookie with a residue of resentment for black players and telling him that that’s not how we did things on the Knicks.

People on a meshed team will help each other personally. They don’t necessarily share their innermost thoughts, but when one man is down psychologically, another picks him up. A group of self-absorbed soloists, on the other hand, never ceases its internal competition.

When Wilt Chamberlain joined Los Angeles in 1968, Elgin Baylor was the verbal leader off court. He was the one who awarded the nicknames and made the jokes on the bus. Wilt’s arrival presented him with a challenge, because Wilt sought preeminence in repartee as well as in basketball statistics. In situations that should have been funny, Wilt and Elgin ended up arguing. No general manager can determine off-court personality roles. They just happen.

In 1982 Moses Malone, an established pro of the first order, joined the Philadelphia 76ers. He had been the NBA MVP two times. The press speculated that with his addition to the team, the brilliant Philadelphia forward Julius Erving might win his first championship. The big “if” was whether the new team would mesh.

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.

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 indomitable, 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.