Values of the Game (6 page)

Coaches who seek the media limelight risk irritating their star players, and the results can be counterproductive: Pouting stars rarely win big games. Coaches who use the media to criticize their players also often live to regret it. Red Holzman was a master in dealing with the press. For him, the only thing that counted was what happened on the floor: He knew that as far as the public was concerned, if the team won, he was a success; if it lost, he was a failure. This insight, combined with his natural modesty and fierce desire to win, produced a postgame demeanor that was, well, unnewsworthy. He never criticized a player. He spoke in truisms that nevertheless underlined his basic principles: All his players were talented; defense was the key; teamwork paid off; only victory was acceptable. Period, end of interview. Red confined his criticism of our play to the locker room, where it belonged.

Above all, the coach who exercises leadership communicates clearly to the players what they have to do. It’s not unlike military training: A commando operation succeeds because each person has a particular assignment and knows what it is in precise detail. The same is true of basketball, but many coaches either burden their players with an overly complicated offense or they don’t suggest any structure to the offense at all. You can be a freewheeling practice coach, like Princeton’s Van Breda Kolff, or a structured practice coach, like Hank Iba, but in each case you have to make sure that every player knows what you want. If you have prepared well enough, events in the game can’t rattle you. I love to see a team that’s ready when the opponent tries a full-court press. That readiness comes only with hours of practice in which each player knows where to go and what to do in order to break the opponent’s press. Picking it apart with precision passes and cuts often leads to easy baskets. It takes only a few such responses before the team that’s doing the pressing retreats from further embarrassment.

Another example of leadership through preparation is getting your team ready for the last-second shot. In the 1998 NCAA tournament, Valparaiso trailed the University of Mississippi by 2 and had the ball out of bounds at the opposite end of the floor. Valparaiso’s Jamie Sykes threw a long pass to teammate Bill Jenkins at the top of the key. Jenkins leaped, caught the ball in midair, and seemingly without pausing to look, flicked it to his left—to Bryce Drew, who shot behind the 3-point line and made the basket, giving Valparaiso the victory. Afterward, both coach and players made the point that the team had rehearsed that particular play all season but had never had a chance to use it until the most important game of the year.

Tactics are not everything; sometimes a coach needs to provide personal leadership. In 1982, Georgetown played the University of North Carolina for the NCAA championship. It was a matchup featuring two of the NCAA’s greatest players that year: Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing and North Carolina’s James Worthy. It was also a matchup of two great coaches: Dean Smith of North Carolina and John Thompson of Georgetown. The game was hard fought and came down to the last seconds. North Carolina went ahead by 1 with eighteen seconds to go on a jump shot by a freshman named Michael Jordan. Georgetown took possession of the ball with plenty of time to make the winning basket. Then—inexplicably, in one of those very human moments on the court—Fred Brown, a Georgetown guard, mistook James Worthy for a teammate and threw a pass directly into Worthy’s hands.

Georgetown’s dream of a championship disappeared. The team was devastated. The fans were in shock. All eyes were on Brown. He had committed a blunder that would be with him for the rest of his life. Thompson understood this, and putting aside his disappointment he wrapped the young player in a bear hug, whispering reassurance in his ear. It was one of the most moving gestures I have ever witnessed on a basketball court. It spoke volumes about Thompson’s relationship to his players, about his most fundamental values, about his excellence as a leader. Billy Packer, the great CBS basketball broadcaster and former star at Wake Forest, recalls seeing a player—Robert “Tractor” Traylor of the University of Michigan—provide similar extraordinary leadership late in the 1997–98 season, when teammate Robbie Reid, a guard who had transferred to Michigan from Brigham Young that year, missed the last-second shot against Michigan State in a Big Ten conference game. The failure seemed emblematic of Reid’s year at Michigan up to that point: He had been a disappointment. Instead of disparaging him, Traylor, all 300 pounds of him, put his arms around his dejected teammate and offered the right words of encouragement. Reid went on to play exceptionally well in the remaining games, and together with Traylor, he powered Michigan to victory in the first Big Ten postseason tournament.

Watching the NCAA Final Four games in 1998, I felt that while the country’s best players might not be on the floor, the players that “fit together best” (as Red Auerbach puts it) were there; in other words, the country’s best teams were on the floor. Time and time again, you saw the leadership rotating, like the lead goose flying in a V formation. In Stanford’s semifinal overtime game against the University of Kentucky, a different player responded at each critical moment. In the last minutes three players—Arthur Lee, Peter Sauer, and Ryan Mendez—hit 3-point shots, two others got important rebounds, and everyone on coach Mike Montgomery’s team played great defense. Stanford lost, but each player had truly done his best. Kentucky played Utah in the final, and it was the same story: Different players on both teams sparked their team’s momentum at different times in the game. At one point, Kentucky’s Heshimu Evans entered as a substitute and went straight to the point of the V, contributing significantly to Kentucky’s eventual victory. Once you’ve seen such broad-based leadership in basketball, you can better appreciate the value of giving a cross-section of people in any organization the opportunity to assume responsibility. You learn that within each of us is the ability to excel, even, or perhaps especially, in times of crisis.

There are also players who lead during a game simply by virtue of their self-confidence. Dean Smith has remarked that often the player who provides the emotional leadership is not necessarily the team’s best player but the one who is held in the greatest respect by the team. When the best player is also the most respected, such as Isiah Thomas, Larry Bird, or the incomparable Michael Jordan, a different dynamic takes over. The best player can then lead by example, contributing more than anyone else to the effort and at the same time spurring teammates to outdo themselves. Oscar Robertson, one of the all-time great NBA stars, once told me that the mark of a truly excellent player is that he makes the worst player on his team into a good one.

Sports are an important part of many people’s lives, both as pursuit and as pastime. They can influence people in subtle ways, helping shape their ideas about how life works and about what is acceptable behavior. When professional baseball and basketball decided on racial desegregation in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it had a far-reaching impact on society. Once the taboo of separateness was challenged on the fields of millions of Americans’ dreams, children began to ask their parents questions and adults increasingly found the old ways indefensible. What had seemed impossible began to change. If desegregation worked in sports, why shouldn’t it work in the rest of American life? The heroes in this racial drama are well known: Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians, Ned Irish of the New York Knicks—all of them executives who saw the future; Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton—black players who lived the experience and in so doing exposed the hollowness and falseness of racial stereotypes.

What is not so well known are the conflicts that had to be resolved among the players. When Rickey announced that Jackie Robinson was joining the Dodgers, tension quickly rose in the clubhouse, a place that cherishes conformity and rarely rewards dissent. A wholesale defection from Rickey’s dream seemed to be in the making: Several players drew up a petition stating their refusal to play with Robinson. Many of the players signed it; a significant exception was Pee Wee Reese, the team’s shortstop and captain. Reese, a white Kentuckian, would later make a point of putting his arm around Robinson’s shoulder when fans heckled him for being who he was. Reese’s splendid act of leadership made a powerful statement, with repercussions across the nation as well as within his team.

A much subtler revolution began in 1972 with the passage of Title IX, which required high schools and colleges to provide women with access to athletic facilities equal to those for men. By 1997–98, women’s basketball reached a new level of public acceptance. The NCAA champion Tennessee Lady Vols averaged attendance of over 14,000 at all their home games. At Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, a town of fewer than 150,000 people, the average game attendance was nearly 8,000. Through the 1980s, women players such as Carol Blazejowski, Nancy Lieberman, Cheryl Miller, Teresa Edwards, and Ann Meyers showed that they were world-class athletes, but after college there were few places they could continue to play. Then, in 1997, the women’s professional leagues took off. The WNBA and ABL games attracted a wide attendance; both leagues were televised. Players such as Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie, and Cynthia Cooper became media stars. Advertisers began using the better players in commercials for shoes, cars, and credit cards. WNBA player Jamila Wideman was even featured on the Nike website. It had been a long, hard battle, and women basketball players were finally accorded recognition and respect.

Many different kinds of leadership brought women’s basketball to its current place. There were the small colleges, such as Immaculata, Old Dominion, and Louisiana Tech, which made early and significant commitments to women’s basketball. There were the coaches—Pat Summitt of Tennessee, Theresa Grentz of Illinois, Tara VanDerveer of Stanford, Geno Auriemma of Connecticut, and countless others—who loved the game and believed that the values it taught were gender-blind and that the excitement the women’s game could generate was at least as great as that created by the men. There were the high school and college athletic directors who embraced Title IX as an opportunity and opened up gym space, practice fields, and weight rooms. There is even a place in the story for NBA commissioner David Stern, who decided to put the league’s marketing muscle behind the WNBA. But among the most effective were those mothers and fathers across America who saw the common sense of opening sports to women and wanted their daughters to have the same chances as their sons to experience the game.

The great leaders in basketball have never been afraid of change and they have led from the strength of their own convictions. And, above all, they have brought out the best in the people they lead.

The first day of practice always tells the story about which players have taken physical conditioning seriously in the off-season. In basketball, if you can’t run, you can’t play. If you haven’t been running for two months before the first practice, you haven’t fulfilled your responsibility to the team. Red Holzman’s rule was that the Knicks were all adults, that we knew we made our living with our bodies, and that if we couldn’t keep them in condition we were hurting not just ourselves but the team. He also said, by way of threatening afterthought, “And then don’t expect to get playing time.” It was up to each of us to stay in condition. Occasionally someone would report to training camp out of shape. Our response would be like that of sharks going after a piece of bloody meat. We would run over, around, and past the laggard until he got the message.

Players who want to last in the NBA must take serious care of themselves. Karl Malone wants to play well past the age when most players retire, so he works out year-round. He lifts weights, runs on the StairMaster, stretches nearly every day. Dennis Rodman is another player who prides himself on his physical shape. When he runs down the floor with his knees kicking high, as if he were a sprinter, he is flaunting his conditioning. The store of energy from a well-honed body also shows in his persistence as a rebounder.

While some young athletes think of themselves as invincible, even immortal, and consequently abuse their bodies with drugs or alcohol, most professional players recognize the gift of time they’ve been given. Walt Frazier’s public image included mink coats, wide-brimmed hats, luxurious cars, beautiful women. The image was a more or less accurate picture of his public lifestyle, but no one on the Knicks was in better condition. Walt, too, worked out year-round. He was a health food advocate before it was cool to be one. He always got plenty of rest. His pride—amounting to a kind of obsession with looking good and a determination never to be embarrassed on the court—and his desire to perform at levels that few had ever reached required that his body function like a well-oiled machine.

By the time most players reach the pros, they’ve shot a basketball a million times. To stay there they know they have to shoot a million more. Chris Mullin of the Pacers, with two assistants feeding him balls, regularly takes an incredible one thousand shots in a normal one-hour practice. In 1984, Larry Bird was the league MVP and the leader of the world-champion Boston Celtics. Shortly after the celebrations ended, he went home to French Lick, Indiana. All summer he lifted weights in the morning and for hours every afternoon went to a gym, often alone, and shot baskets. Magic Johnson once said of Larry Bird, “To most players, basketball is a job. To Larry, it was life.” One could say the same thing about Magic—or Rick Barry or Jerry West, Nate Archibald or George Gervin, Dave Cowens or George Mikan.

Hubie Brown became an assistant coach for the Milwaukee Bucks in 1972. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the team’s center. Brown, eager to show the coaching staff how conscientious he was, arrived at practice on the first day of training camp one and a half hours before it was scheduled to begin. To his astonishment, Kareem, the league MVP for the previous two seasons, was already on the floor practicing, shooting skyhook after skyhook, perfecting his graceful release, grooving his rhythm—look at the basket, step left, cradle the ball, right leg up, swing the right arm high, release, follow through—putting in the time as if he were a sophomore in high school. To Kareem, this effort at skill development was just part of being a champion. An aspect of his daily routine involved shooting the hook with a rebounding ring inside the rim, thereby shrinking the space available for a successful shot. When he removed the ring after the thirty-day training period, he said that he felt as if he were shooting the ball into the ocean.