Values of the Game by Bill Bradley

Bil Bradley’s Values of the Game is a book of basketball wisdom by one of the premier players of the past era, Bill Bradley. This book is important because it was written by a person who pursued basketball excellence relentlessly throughout his youth, yet decided to take Rhodes scholarship and play basketball at Oxford University, England, instead going to the New York Knicks as their draft pick (the Knicks will take him later anyway).

Bradley is an epitome of achievement. Whatever he touched, he turned into gold: as an athlete, as a scholar, as a politician. This book opens up the world of Bradley’s mind, it shows how his basketball and life decision-making fed his success. How many basketball players today would turn down Nicks contract to go to Europe and pursue academic interests? I can flip the question: how many NBA players today have a meaningful life after their basketball career is over. No wonder research shows that 60% of them will be broke within five years from retirement.

Bill Bradley loved basketball maybe more than anybody before or after him, but what makes him special is that he was able to see the “big picture”. In this book he explains how qualities which make a great basketball player transcend the sport itself and they become transferable to other spheres of life.

About Bill Bradley

Bradley’s basketball ability was enhanced by his unusually wide peripheral vision. While most people’s horizontal field covers 180 degrees, his covered 192 degrees. Vertically most people can see 47 degrees upward; Bradley could see 72 degrees. He is left-handed. During his high school years, Bradley maintained a maniacal practice schedule. He would work on the court for “three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day. He put ten pounds of lead slivers in his sneakers, set up chairs as opponents and dribbled in a slalom fashion around them, and wore eyeglass frames that had a piece of cardboard taped to them so that he could not see the floor, for a good dribbler never looks at the ball.” – from Expedia.com

In this summary of the book, enjoy the best excerpts, but go to the library and read it whole, it’s well worth the effort.

Passion

I couldn’t get enough. If I hit ten in a row, I wanted fifteen. If I hit fifteen, I wanted twenty-five. Driven to excel by some deep, unsurveyed urge, I stayed out on that floor hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

Some players these days seem more angry than joyful, yet the great ones still have a zest.

Discipline

Ed Macauley, a forward fro the St. Luis Hawks, ran a week-long basketball camp which Bill attended when he was fourteen. “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, give 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.

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. [...] I was determined that no one would outwork me.

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.

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.

Skill development comes next. The critical years are in high school, and the real preparation begins when the season ends.

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.

By the time I was thirty-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.

It takes real character to derive enjoyment from the pass that leads to the pass that leads to the basket.

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.

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.

Selflessness

Championships are not won unless a team has forged a high degree of unity, attainable only through the selflessness of each of its players.

Statistics don’t always measure teamwork; holding the person you’re guarding scoreless doesn’t show up in your stats.

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.

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.

On offense, there are three unselfish team actions that make all the difference: passing, screening, moving without the ball.

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. [...] That’s what Pete Carril, Princeton’s former coach of twenty-nine years, would characterize as “help someone else, help yourself.”

Respect

Pete Carril of Princeton tells a story from his childhood that every college athlete should ponder. Carril’s father worked in an 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.”

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.”)

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. [...] Against Boston, I considered the night a great success if I scored 15 while Havlicek scored 25 and the Knicks won.

Sometimes players neglect this wider off-court obligation and focus only on themselves. By the time these players are ready to retire, they have little identity broader than their eroding skills. When the post-basketball world puts new demands on their character, they find that the worth of their  basketball career begins to disappear behind them like foot-prints in a desert windstorm.

Once you’ve learned to show respect in basketball, you’ve probably received it as well. Then you can feel how easy it is to give even the least important person his or her due.

Perspective

The right path is really very simple: Give respect to teammates of different race, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your common humanity, share your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal, help one another achieve it. No destructive lies. No ridiculous fears. No debilitating anger.

Courage

Courage in sports means, in the simplest terms, giving 100 percent for your team. In basketball, if there’s a loose ball, you dive for it; forget that the floor is hardwood. If you go for a rebound and get elbowed in the face, make sure that the next time you go back even harder. If you’re playing tough defense and the man you’re guarding takes you into a screen set by a burly forward, fight over the screen. If you set a screen and a big forward is about to run into you with all the force of a linebacker, take the hit. Every time I see Patrick Ewing take the charge by placing his body in front of a 6-feet-9 240-pound forward going full speed for the basket, I want to hug him in admiration. [...] It’s worth emphasizing that courage is not the same thing as fearlessness. It means accepting and then overcoming fear – fear of injury, of failing, of looking bad, of relinquishing excuses.

When a reporter asked the English runner David Moorcroft why he had never dropped out of a race even in the worst of circumstances, he replied, “I think that once you do, you’ve given yourself an option for the future.”

In 1997, Michael Jordan was running a fever of 102 in the fifth game of the finals against the Utah Jazz, but he played anyway. He wasn’t afraid of looking bad because of a below-par performance. He wasn’t afraid of permanent damage to his health.

When all the money is on the line, a brave player wants the ball. He is willing to stare defeat down. His confidence builds with the pressure. The standing joke on many teams is about the scorer who wants the ball for three quarters but can’t be found at crunch time. Technically his shooting is perfect, but his fear of failure is too great.

If you’re a shooter and you start missing, you have to keep taking your open shots. This is no small thing.

Leadership

Leadership means getting people to think, believe, see, and do what they might not have without you. It means possessing the vision to set the right goal and the decisiveness to pursue it single-mindedly.

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.

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.

Responsibility

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.

Hubie Brown became an assistant coach for the Milwaukee Bucks in 1972. Kareen 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 being. 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.

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.

Resilience

Rudyard Kipling told us to “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”

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.

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.

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.

It may be that by accepting the limits to resilience we can celebrate it, using it when we can and cherishing it while it lasts. I’ve made it through more than a few tough moments in my life by drawing on the resources of my basketball years.

Imagine the comfort in knowing that by never giving up, by accepting the bad breaks and going on, you will have lived life to the fullest, and maybe will have lived it a little longer. Such peace of mind is often reward enough.