Expatriate Games: My Season of Misadventures in Czech Semi-Pro Basketball by Dave Fromm

I finished reading Dave Fromm’s Expatriate Games: My Season of Misadventures in Czech Semi-Pro Basketball within hours after I got it in mail. The events of author’s adventure are intertwined with his thoughts about future, reminiscences of past NBA and college games, his struggles to find a basketball team in a country whose language he can’t speak and can barely understand. All this moves quickly, sentences flow smoothly like they should in a well-written book.

So, let me be upfront – I liked this book! Granted, I could relate to it for many reasons. During the year of Dave’s adventures, I was myself in transition in Croatia, one of the pieces of Yugoslavia, true European basketball empire, only two years after Croatia took one and only Dream Team in the finals of the Barcelona Olympics, lost to them big without being utterly embarrassed. I know too what it means to  work religiously on your ball handle and turnaround shot for hours on end, chasing a dream of once making it in front of thousands of roaring fans, despite the low odds of it ever happening, despite knowing deep inside that your talent can take you only “that far”.

You could read Expatriate Games as a saga about an undersized point guard destined to become a lawyer, or as a story about a future lawyer who never outgrew his dream to be a professional basketball player. This book may be more about pains of consolidating one’s self in an alien environment than about basketball, and in that regard it is a book about so many of us. But in all its aspects it is a splendid read, not boring whether or not you have interest in the sport, and at times a funny read indeed. It may be more valuable than Maravich, Bradley, Jordan, Walton books… because these books are about super humans. Even when they struggle, you know they will come back strong and win it all in the end by hitting the final shot. With David, you never know if his TJ Sokol Kralovske Vinohrady team will even play their next game because opening of the gym may depend on the mood of the housekeeper, or the gym could have been double-booked and there’s a handball game going on. There are more variables at play than in real pro games: the bottles of rum the players shared on the bus, exams they have to prepare for school of dubious legitimacy, painful breakups with their girlfriends, or a sudden rain on the outdoors court in France during their first and only international tournament.

An inspiring book for all the high school point guards who will score most of their points while serving in the military, teaching, or practicing law. A great book for travelers who feel so helpless after changing their money in Prague to discover minutes later that the place next door offers 20% better exchange rate. An interesting book for all those who like books which can be swallowed within hours, but will linger in their mind for weeks after.

From My Notes

The whole experience starts with misunderstanding and underlines the author’s good sense of humor:

And he (Jan Wiener, a formidable septuagenarian and Holocaust survivor) said, “Don’t back out.” That kind of challenge, from that kind of man, wasn’t going to come along too often. “I won’t,” I said, and meant it. We shook hands; Jan’s grip was firm and controlled, the grip of a man at ease with himself [...] I checked the rearview mirror, hit the gas, and immediately skidded the tail end of the car up over the low snowbank at the edge of Jan’s garage and onto his small, pristine lawn. When I got out to push on the fender, I saw Jan watching from his kitchen window. He looked concerned. I gave him the thumbs-up. Mission accepted. It was months before I figured out that when Jan had said, “Don’t back out,” he had not meant “of this formative life challenge.” He had meant “of my driveway”.

In any adventure like this, you’d expect some intriguing characters, people appearing as if coming out of dreams:

…and Skee Graf, who seemed to embody the reinventive expat aesthetic better than anyone. In the brief time I’d known Skee, he’d moved in and out of sight, dating young and beautiful Czech girls, passing out old Russian passports and outdated currency, asking indecipherable questions like, “You know Ponyboy?” and, “Why do my hands always smell like chicken?” before vanishing again with such effortlessness that I sometimes wondered if he existed at all.

Dave hasn’t made the team yet, but he’s a bit philosophical about the game of basketball and differences between the game as played in the U.S. and in Europe. I have to make a point here, sorry, Dave! Czech Republic is just a tiny dot on the map of European basketball. Real European basketball countries are: Spain, Greece, Turkey, Italy, all countries coming out of former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Croatia in particular), Russia. The equivalent experience taking place in Vitoria, Spain, might have yielded completely opposite conclusions. The point being made, there is much to be agreed about in the statement below.

The scrimmage seemed to reflect fundamental differences between the skill sets – and mind-sets – of U.S. and European players in the mid-1990s. The Czechs, at least the ones on this court, seemed relatively new to basketball, entranced by the geometry of it, the arcs and angles, the form and percentages. They focused on, and thereby excelled at, certain things – the three-point shot, the rolling hook, the multiple, inside-outside passes. They tended to be weak dribblers, their upper bodies churning like train pistons when they pushed the ball downcourt. They favored the pull-up pump-fake and the slide-step and eschewed going all the way to the hole. By contrast, the U.S. game I’d left behind seemed to have gotten bored of jump-shooting and was enamored with the idea of the dunk – not the dunk itself, which remained out of reach for many players, but the idea of it, which promoted patterns and spacing, encouraged individualism and explosions of energy. U.S. players, especially those in unstructured environments, overexposed to highlight shows and All-Star games, seemed to play with the idea of the dunk in the back of their minds. From the smallest point guard to the heaviest power forward, guys seemed to play to be part of the dunk, to dunk themselves, to facilitate the dunk. To drive the paint as if they were going to dunk, even if it just turned into a layup, going to the hole and planting, both feet square and the ball cocked back. Because maybe, just that once, they might then tomahawk the ball through the hoop, and hang for a second on the bent rim, and wouldn’t that be just about the end of it?

Here’s a crash course in Czech basketball trash talk…

Ti vole, Tomas said, was the default locker-room disparagement I was likely to hear most often. It meant, roughly, “You castrated ox.” A missed shot, a bad joke, a spilled beer; you could say Ti vole for any of them. You could say it angrily or affectionately. It seemed to be an important phrase to know. Bohuzel meant “unfortunately.” Kureci prsa was “chicken breast.”

… and some more…

My Czech language teacher told me that Tobe do oci meant, roughly, “Right in front of your eyes!” It was as close as she could get to “In your face!” “Tobe do oci!” I said when I drove on Kratcha. “Tobe do oci, ti vole,” I said when I drilled a three on Tomas. “Do prdele (Go to my ass), ti vole,” I said to Poli, when I snuck up behind him and blocked his shot.

Helplessness of being all alone in a foreign country even while doing the most familiar thing.

At the next dead ball, I went with Michal. I felt tight, wound up, surprised at how foreign the foreign court felt. All around me, people were speaking words I couldn’t understand, warning of blind picks, setting defenses. For all the one-on-one stuff, basketball was indisputably about teams, not about individuals. Teams chewed individuals up. Teams funneled individuals into the lane and collapsed on them.

I’ve enjoyed European basketball for many years, basketball of chess-like strategy, with planned out offenses and complicated defensive schemes. I’ve enjoyed baskets coming out of multiple passes; the ball swirls around for a long time, but you see it coming, one guy pops out in the open and takes the shot which inevitably goes in. I would lie, though, if I wouldn’t admit that I find dunking the most mesmerizing form of artistry in the game. I agree with first two points Dave makes and I am intrigued by the third one while struggling to fully understand it.

Growing up, we would try to dunk all kinds of things, figuring out what we could hold onto and measuring our steps from the rim. We’d dunk tennis balls, crushed soda cans, softballs, cantaloupes. I dunked a slightly deflated volleyball once, but the basketball never went down for me. I thought a lot about dunking. Once, my dad and I tried to develop criteria for ranking the dunks we had seen (he never dunked either), with the ultimate goal of identifying the greatest dunk ever. It was a pointless thing to do since all other dunks would pale in comparison to three we’d never see – our own, and Earl Manigault’s circa 1965 jam over three forwards at the Rucker – but we did it anyway. There were three criteria for the greatest dunk ever; like a lot of criteria, they could have just as easily been applied to the wider world. First, the greatest dunk ever had to be in a real live meaningful game, the more meaningful the better. The dunk had to matter to be great – jams that came out of Slam-Dunk contests and All-Star games seemed erstaz and accommodating by comparison. Of course, there were exceptions: Ced Ceballos got creativity props for the blindfold dunk, and Julius’s first foul-line jam had all sorts of sociocultural implications. Second, and for similar reasons, there had to be a defender. Breakaways didn’t count. A monster dunker had a victim, a Hektor to his Achilles. The bigger or better the defender, the more likely it was that the dunk would be special. As the NBA evolved into big-money entertainment, only a few players still seemed willing to try to block dunks (Mutombo, Mourning); most everyone else seemed reluctant to wind up on a poster. As a result, it was rare that Jordan or Barkley even had a chance to really exceed expectations. Although Barkley still did on occacion. Finally, it was good if the dunk at least appeared to be an extension of the player’s personal integrity. Speculating about the personal integrity of professional athletes is ridiculously dumb, but we tried to extrapolate from what we knew of the person’s game, his home life, his childhood, so that the dunk might become a spiritual act, a representative of the player’s soul, his moral fabric. This was sometimes easier to figure out with guards.

Here comes Dejda, the semi-Czech, the ultimate supplement of the Czech semi-pro basketball league. Without her, this whole basketball adventure would be less interesting even if she rarely comes to see the games. She lives in a different tunnel of Dave’s consciousness, and she’s bound to be out of it before the end of the book…

She smiled in a way that made her seem sort of like a wild animal, the sort of animal for whom showing teeth is both a sign of aggression and of vulnerability. Her name was Dejda Chandlerova, a name that sounded like e meteorological event. Di-E-da Supernova. She said she was half-Czech, working in a bio-chemistry lab at Charles University for some unspecified length of time, living in an apartment owned by her aunt, and eating dinners with her babicka. She jad hips like the run of a luge course.

… because you just felt she wasn’t the “uncomplicated woman” from the author’s fantasy.

During that first summer after college, as I’d watched my friends move on toward futures that seemed infinitely more promising than my own, I developed this very specific fantasy of what it would look like when my life got going. In the fantasy, it was late at night, and I was up, sitting at a desk, holding my glasses in my hand like I’d just taken them off to make a point. The desk was covered with meaningful work – some virtually unsolvable problem that I could unravel only if I applied myself fully. A beautiful, uncomplicated woman slept in a nerby bed. The bedside alarm was set for 7:00 A.M. It was a detailed fantasy, and I was impressed that I’d managed to fit it in between shifts as a parking lot attendant at Tanglewood.

This reminded me of my brother, once a professional volleyball player, who said that Rade Malević, a great Croatian player from mid-eighties, had 110cm vertical leap, which was obviously great. Since then, I measured my own vertical leap on several occasions and was always disappointed with the result. I could understand Bob’s disappointment all too well.

Radek told me that he had a 65-centimeter vertical leap. I had no idea what that meant. Even if I’d been sober, the conversation would have bee tricky. Radek said Charles Barkley had a 120-centimeter vertical leap, something he seemed to expect me to know. Bob said that, because of his ankle problems, his vertical leap was only 60 centimeters. That still sounded quite high, I told him, but he frowned into his beer. Sometimes, he said, he wondered why he kept playing at all when Barkley could do such wondrous things.

Troubles begin with the half-Czech girl… but then this great injection of humor, the author himself on the receiving end of the sting.

An hour later, I was still waiting for her at the bar, and she hadn’t shown up again. I began to think about what Vitas Gerulaisis said after he finally beat John McEnroe after sixteen consecutive losses: “Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis seventeen times in a row.”

Most everybody knows the difference between shooters and scorers, but here’s introduction of another category with negative connotation: gunners. Yes, we’ve all played with them, people who think that every shot they miss is way more exciting than a shot somebody else makes.

Gunners had a negative connotation, in that it implied an excessive spraying of shots. Someone who shot frequently, and rashly, and with little success, was a gunner. Gunners ignored their teammates, and thus rarely lasted long in any organized context. My high school coach had a formula he’d apply to determine if someone was gunning: If your point total was equal to or greater than the number of shots you attempted, you were okay. It was a formula weighted heavily in favor of the scorer, since if you took enough threes and got fouled on enough jump shots, you didn’t have to shoot a very high percentage to remain in the black. Shooters were not necessarily gunners because they could shoot well. Often, shooters occupied the role of specialists on organized teams; other players got the rebounds, delivered the passes, set things up. Shooters, everyone knew, saved their energy, floated around, and picked their spots like snipers. Scorers – who were not necessarily as gifted at shooting as shooters – occasionally had to resort to gunning. But scorers usually had their own advantages: They were able to create their own shots, something that shooters were neither inclined nor encouraged to do. Jordan, the classic scorer, had worked hard to become a shooter, and it showed in his 1992 Finals first-half barrage against a hapless Clyde the Glide Drexler and the Blazers.

More or less, we’ll agree. This paragraph will reveal nothing new about the role and value of point guards, but for some reason I always underline these pieces of worn out wisdom. I often argue with friends whether it is more important to have a great center or a great point guard on basketball team in order to win a championship. Of course, my friends win the argument by agreeing quickly that point guard is way more important. To this day I remain unconvinced.

Point guard is the hardest position to play in basketball. Point guards start all the plays, push the ball upcourt, and settle the team down. Their roles are nuanced; they might try to score, but not too much, but also not pass too much. They need to identify how their individual teammates are playing, see who has a hot hand, who is off. They need to channel their coach, call the defenses, set everything up. And they do all this all game long. By their passes and play-calling, they can authorize a player to shoot, and when a player feels authorized to shoot, he’s more likely to shoot well. The point guard was almost always in the middle on the break, making decisions about who should get the ball, and where and when. They needed to be unselfish, but still retain their own scoring threat, lest defenders sag off.

What it takes to be en effective power forward if a bit undersized?

You had to be a freak of nature to excel as an undersized forward in the pros; Barkley was a freak of nature – they said he could stand under the basket on one foot and jump up and dunk. Karl Malone was sort of a freak of nature, but more of a self-made one, built in the weight room, not in the celestial interstices.

The greatest basketball game every played, in author’s view. Many will disagree, and we’ll never know which game was the best ever played. Google search pops up NC State versus Maryland ACC Tournament Final game in 1974, in John Feinstein’s view.

The 1992 Duke-Kentucky game was probably the best game that had been played in my life-time, the game that Laettner won on a turnaround foul-line jumper at the buzzer, taking Grant Hill’s full-court pass with two seconds left. Just moments before, down one, a Kentucky guard name Sean Woods had taken the worst last-second shot you could imagine, an off-balance, one-handed floating bank shot from straight on, over the outstretched arms of the six-foot-eleven Laettner. The commentators were clearly aghast. One of them said, “Where did he find the … courage … to take that shot?” Duke and Kentucky had been trading punches all game, the clock was winding down, Mashburn had fouled out with 28, and Kentucky had to get a shot up. Woods didn’t know quite what to do. he got into the lane, Laettner was in position (Laettner, who shouldn’t have even been in the game, having stomped on Kentucky forward Aminu Timberlake’s chest earlier in the game), and Woods left his feet, leaning in, and made it. And for the length of a time-out, that was all that mattered in the world.

This paragraph I find funny and in contradiction with everything I’ve heard about foreign players in Europe (Czech league should be no exception being one of the least demanding in Europe). All you hear is how foreign, by this meaning U.S., players can ONLY jump and do nothing else. They supposedly bring their athleticism with them and none of the game’s fundamentals valued so much in European basketball.

In The Prague Post, they ran a story about the eight non-Czech players in the Superliga under the headline FOREIGN MEN CAN’T JUMP. The article detailed the struggles that the foreigners were having adapting to the Czech teams, and quoted Tracey talking about his frustration over only being loved for the occasional dunk.

Czech basketball boring – point proven. Have to say though, and this is where I give the author a lot of credit. If he made his way to any Superliga team, he’d probably find it much easier to play and maybe even to excel. It is here in the dungeons of the “semi-pro” leagues that you have to play against the uninventive echalons of the game, having your own game subjected to their standard, your own creativity curtailed.

The Czech ballers had grown up studying diagrams and play sheets, not watching World B. Free “create his own shot” or Jordan dunk on Kelly Tripucka. They played an ordered game. I was starting to figure that out, and not surprisingly, we were playing better and more together on the court.

The breeze smelled like wet earth. Young couples made out on the steps of the John Hus statue. The day seemed made for daydreaming, as maybe most days do when you can’t speak the language well, only go to class eight hours a week and don’t have a full-time job.

Who is this gifted point guard? The only Czech player known beyond its borders is Jiří Welsch, who might have overlapped with the author when he still played for Pardubice or later for Sparta, Prague, but he played Superliga, so it is not very likely.

Horni Pocernice tore into us behind their star guard. He was gifted, his game economical. He dangled the ball out in front of him, but by the time you reached for it, he’d gone by you for a skying finger-roll or a pull-up jumper. He was the kind of guard who got offensive rebounds off foul shots by being in the right place faster than anyone else. In the first half, we were keying on him so much that he was able to thread passes through our focused defense to cutters back-dooring their men.

Yes, all the work we’ve put into our game. Without all the hours could you endure being in a foreign country chasing your dream and fulfilling it?

Just from the sound you could tell the ball was rubber and overinflated. I could hear the pauses and the footsteps when the ball hit a crack and had to be chased down in the street. Two kids appeared, between the green curtains of leaves, young, bouncing the ball irregularly between them every couple of steps, exclusively right-handed. I thought about all the ball-handling drills I’d ever tried, the figure eights, the spider dribbles, dribbling while wearing mittens, with my eyes closed, with plastic handcuffs over the mittens. About hours spent whirling the ball around – first hips, then ankles, then next, then hips again, like a satellite. About a couple of exceptionally restless nights in junior high school where I slept with my basketball, because I’d heard that Pete Maravich used to do that. About watching and watching again, in super slow-mo, Isiah’s double back-and-forth against Alvin Robertson – Alvin Robertson!-in the 1989 All-Star Game that put Alvin so far back on his heels he couldn’t even get his balance to wave at the ensuing jump shot. Or Jordan’s unusual left-right-left crossover on Bird in the 63-point game. Or Timmy Hardaway’s UTEP Two-Step on Mark Price and his hanging and-one follow. Every drill I’d tried to become a ball-handler, to learn each new crossover, each new spin. To hold onto what other people wanted.

I find the adventure of the international tournament surreal and sad… sad because it’s clear with every sentence that the adventure is coming to a close, Dejda is already gone, the dream will vanish soon, the point guard will become a lawyer.

Also, I wanted to remember the moment when I could start to think of myself as an international basketball player. So far, I’d been limited to Prague or its suburbs, but once we crossed into Germany, we became something more: national athletic representatives, mercenaries, barnstormers.

In the sarcastic rhyme of this sentence, “Daveed is the best; he is from the West” you can feel ambivalence of European’s view of Americans. Certain envy is intertwined with attitude that American ways are too simplistic, dumb in a way, for “sophisticated” Europeans, who don’t see their complex heritage as chains around their legs.

Slava, sweaty and grinning, turned around in the seat in front of me, holding another bottle of rum. He wrapped his meaty hands around my neck and whispered, “Daveed is the best; he is from the West.” The bus started to roll again. It wasn’t stopping. We were in Germany. I took the rum from Slava, swigged deeply, and closed my eyes.

Unless you are a French, of course, thus wondering how it’s possible that there are non-French humans.

Afterward, the St. Pierre players were congratulatory and hospitable, encouraging us like we were refugees. They did not seem to mind the loss much, and appeared more than consoled by the fact that they remained French, and we did not.

Other reviews:

• By Matt McHale, Editor of Basketbawful.com

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.