Values of the Game (3 page)

On offense, there are three unselfish team actions that make all the difference. The first is passing. Bob Cousy, the great guard on the Boston Celtics in the fifties and sixties, filled the center lane on a fast break with such textbook simplicity that you wanted to replay it over and over so kids could learn their fundamentals. Cousy took the ball to the middle of the court with two of his teammates filling the lanes on his right and left and a third teammate trailing to pick up the easy eighteen-footer if a layup by one teammate or a short jumper by Cousy didn’t develop. He created too many choices for the defense to handle, and the key was his ability to pass the ball. Watching the Los Angeles Lakers from 1982 to 1989 with Magic Johnson running the fast break was a comparable lesson. The ball whizzed down the court with a minimum of dribbling—from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Michael Cooper to Magic for the play in the middle, in which he often dished the ball off to James Worthy for a layup. Magic had the ability to see not only when someone was open for a pass, but also what his teammate would do with the ball when he got it. I call that seeing the whole court, a remarkable sixth-sense quality also possessed by the great Pelé in soccer and Wayne Gretzky in hockey.

On an unselfish team, the passer knows the ball will come back. The better passer a center is, the easier it will be for him to score. When opponents double down on him, he can whip the ball to someone who has an open shot. Then when the defense recovers, a teammate whips it right back to the center. Do that a few times and the defense is reeling. But it starts with an unselfish center. That’s what Pete Carril, Princeton’s former coach of twenty-nine years, would characterize as “help someone else, help yourself.”

During a game, what I loved most was spotting an imbalance in the opponent’s defense and getting the ball to the open man at the right time, in the right place, with the right zip. I loved sensing where a teammate was and following my intuition with a pass. I would notice when an opponent turned his head the wrong way, then throw the ball past his ears or behind his legs to a cutting teammate. Often, if you had a willing partner, the two of you could get a two-person game going without interfering with the flow of the team. Walt Frazier and I used to run a simple backdoor play. I was the passer. The center would clear to my side of the floor and Frazier would drift toward the top of the key. As I dribbled away from the center and toward Frazier, we would catch each other’s eye, and after a hesitation step or a fake in my direction, he would cut quickly behind his man into the open area just in front of the foul line. I would give him a bounce pass. He’d catch it and in one motion go for the layup and the Garden crowd would explode. The value of such a move was that it got our team 2 points. (It also improved my relationship with Frazier. Who wouldn’t appreciate someone who got you an easy 2?) And it tended to demoralize the other team by making them look foolish.

Screening—placing your body in the way of an opponent—is another way to help a teammate get an easier shot. Today the screen-and-roll is a staple of the pro game, and there are no two people better at it than John Stockton and Karl Malone of the Utah Jazz. Malone sets a screen on Stockton’s defender. If Malone’s defender fails to switch out on Stockton, then Stockton has a clear jump shot. If Malone’s man does switch out on Stockton, Malone rolls away so that Stockton’s man is behind him, creating a passing lane in the space vacated by the defender who switched out. Stockton bounces a quick pass to Malone, who has an easy layup. For these two players, this series of maneuvers becomes an offensive weapon. More times than not, one of them scores on it.

Setting a screen away from the ball is an unexpected move that often springs a teammate into the open to receive a pass. If there is a double team on the man coming off the screen, the screener simply cuts to the basket unguarded. If a passer is alert and gets the ball to the former screener, the latter gets an easy layup. The beauty of screening is that on a team of good passers each screen has several options. The defense can never be sure what will happen next. It is an impossible situation to cover without a perfectly executed team defense, and develops only because one player helps another.

Moving without the ball is the third unselfish act of a great offense, one that too few players know how to do. They either stand around and watch their teammates go one on one or they run after the ball, clogging up large areas of the court in the process. A forward simply clearing out of one side so that there is only a guard and a center left is the most elementary example of this strategy. When timed to the movement of the ball, creating space makes things happen. Nobody I know ever said to a teammate, “Why don’t you bring the guy guarding you into where I’m working, because I like trying to pass or score a basket in traffic.” When you move without the ball on an unselfish team, and you work hard to lose your man, you know that if you pop open you’ll get the ball. John Havlicek was difficult to guard because he never stopped moving, and every time he got a half step on me (which was more often than I care to be specific about), he got the ball and got it in good scoring position.

I can learn more about people by playing a three-on-three game with them for twenty minutes than I can by talking with them for a week. I once hired a new director for my U.S. Senate offices in New Jersey. I liked him, but it wasn’t until I played basketball with him that I knew I’d made the right choice. I found out that he was a hard worker (he went for the rebound), competitive with a fierce desire to win (he played close defense), and unselfish (he screened away from the ball).

There is a special bond on an unselfish team. It remains steadfast even with the passage of time. Whenever I see Willis Reed, I remember how he risked permanent injury in order to play in the seventh game of the 1970 championships. When I see Frazier, or DeBusschere, or Monroe, or Jackson, or Barnett, or Lucas, I remember—how could I not?—all the practices, the flights, the bus trips, the locker room banter out of which came our collective identity. How can I ever forget their professionalism, their desire to win, their willingness to trust me and the other teammates with their greatest dream: to be a champion?

In the winter of 1997, I went to New York for a weekend celebration commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Celtics-Knicks rivalry. Players from both teams, from every era, congregated at Madison Square Garden. The best-represented team was also the best basketball team of all time: the 1964–65 Celtics, with Bill Russell, Tom Heinsohn, and Sam Jones, among others. You could tell that these men still existed as a unit. They were grayer and heavier, but they were still warriors in each other’s eyes. The pride they felt for what they had accomplished was palpable, and something else that was clear to everyone was the respect and friendship they still felt for one another.

Championship teams share a moment that few other people know. The overwhelming emotion derives from more than pride. Your devotion to your teammates, the depth of your sense of belonging, is something like blood kinship, but without its complications. Rarely can words fully express it. In the nonverbal world of basketball, it’s like grace or beauty or ease in other areas of your life. It is the bond that selflessness forges.

Professional athletes begin their experience with sports much as millions of other kids do. For me, basketball suddenly became a serious matter in the seventh grade. I was serving as the den chief in a Cub Scout pack that met on Tuesdays, at the same time as basketball practice. In the middle of the meeting during the first week of practice, I got a call from my mother, informing me that the coach had just phoned to say that if I was not at practice in twenty-five minutes, I was off the team. So much for the Cub Scouts. The coach demanded respect for the sport, and I gave it fully, from that day on.

Today recruiting begins in the seventh grade. Ambitious parents eyeing a pro career for their kids bargain with the high school coach for a preferred style of play before they allow their son or daughter to attend the coach’s school. Universities award scholarships to talented players who perfunctorily fill out an admissions application and who often, unsurprisingly, fail to graduate. Players turn pro out of high school or early in college, giving up their chance for an education for the uncertainties of life on the road. Pro teams cope with players who regularly have brushes with the law. In one sense, the game is struggling to keep its integrity alive.

Yet for every unscrupulous recruiter or bad coach who exploits the young people he is supposed to lead, there are still thousands committed to the deeper values of the game. They quietly go about their job of shaping young lives. They resist the pressures to ratify the behavior that too many TV images glorify and they continue to preach the gospel of “no shortcuts to work,” “no championship without individual sacrifice,” “no feeling like the satisfaction of a job well done.” They know that the noble spirit of athletic competition and achievement can reflect the highest values of our collective life.

Every athlete ultimately has a choice about whether to do the right thing when temptations pull the other way. These moments begin in high school, when a teacher may want to give you a break simply because you play ball. They continue in college, as alumni hover protectively and flatter frequently. As a professional basketball player, you’re exposed to drugs, alcohol, and fast-buck artists in every town you visit. You either say no to the allure of the fast lane or you fail to respect yourself enough to keep to what you know is in your own interest in the long run.

By the time players reach college, the chance for coaches to shape character declines, but they can still be instrumental in influencing long-term goals. John Thompson at Georgetown, Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina, Bobby Knight at Indiana, and Mike Krzyzewski are examples of tough taskmasters who oversee the nonathletic commitments of their students: Approximately 90 percent of the players in those four programs graduate. Pete Carril of Princeton tells a story from his childhood that every college athlete should ponder. Carril’s father worked in a open-hearth steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Every morning before he left for work and Pete and his sister for school, he’d turn to them at the breakfast table and say, “In this life, the big strong guys are always taking from the smaller, weaker guys but… the smart take from the strong.”

The really great coaches engage their players in a quest to be the best. Some bark their orders; others are more like machines, with a clipboard full of practice drills. In the right player-coach relationship, a quiet “well done” can go a long way. (As Mark Twain said, “Most of us can run pretty well all day long on one compliment.”) By talking candidly about the problems of adolescence or the vagaries of the parent-child relationship, some high school coaches extend their reach to life off the court. Their players may never become pros, but because they learned the values of the game they are better prepared for life. Many people in all walks of life will tell you that their lives were turned around by a coach who took an interest in their total well-being.

By the time they turn professional, basketball players have generally learned that their entire career is governed by many sets of rules. If you want to play, you have to abide by them. UCLA coach John Wooden made it a team rule that none of his players sport facial hair. Bill Walton, one of UCLA’s star players in the 1970s, once returned from a ten-day layoff with a beard. When he came onto the floor for practice, Wooden asked him whether he’d forgotten something. Walton replied, “Coach, if you mean the beard, I think I should be allowed to wear it. It’s my right.”

“Do you believe that strongly?” Wooden asked.

“Yes, I do, Coach. Very much,” Walton answered.

Wooden’s response was polite. “Bill, I have a great respect for individuals who stand up for those things in which they believe. I really do. And the team is going to miss you.”

Walton immediately went to the locker room and shaved off his beard. As Wooden recalls in his memoir,
A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court
, “There were no hard feelings…. He understood that the choice was between his own desires and the good of the team, and Bill was a team player. I think if I had given in to him, I would have lost control, not only of Bill but of his teammates.”

My coach at Princeton was Bill (Butch) Van Breda Kolff, who taught basketball with something of the extemporaneous quality of a jazz performance. We didn’t have very many set plays. There were no drills for passing or boxing out on rebounds. He taught us about the fundamentals in the context of play, stopping a half-court or full-court game from time to time to tell us what we could have done better. Under his freelance offense, players developed the ability to create, to see things emerging. Above all, the game was fun. My coach for the 1964 Olympics, Hank Iba of Oklahoma State, took the opposite approach. Every morning during practice, he lectured the team, using a blackboard to display diagrams for the offense. We had to keep notebooks of these lectures. During a game, he tolerated no deviation from his plays or their options. Both coaches emphasized conditioning. Their personalities and their styles of coaching were as different as their preferred offenses, but both men engendered respect—Van Breda Kolff because of his intensity in competition, Iba because of his thoroughness in practice.

When you’re playing defense, you generally get to know your opponent very well. You know whether he prefers going right or left on a drive, or whether he shoots less well from a certain place on the court, but you also form an impression of his personality—how hard he works, how much he wants to win, how he makes up for his weaknesses, how likely he is to blame someone else for his own failure. When both of you hold nothing back and push as hard as possible to win, you are both at your most vulnerable—because one of you will fail. Your opponent sees this in you, as you see it in him. From this rugged intimacy emerges a unique respect. Beating a weaker player by a lot holds only a fraction of the joy that you get from beating an evenly matched player by the slimmest of margins. For me, having a good game against Bob Love of Chicago or Jack Marin of Baltimore or Bill Bridges of Los Angeles or Lou Hudson of Atlanta was more rewarding than running rings around a rookie. Against Boston, I considered the night a great success if I scored 15 while Havlicek scored 25 and the Knicks won.