by Bill Bradley
Skill development comes next. The critical years are in high school, and the real preparation begins when the season ends. Off-season is when major leaps occur in a high school player’s abilities, when you develop the crossover dribble, the reverse pivot, and opposite-hand shooting.
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.
The great thing about discipline is that you can get immediate returns on your investment of time and effort: The harder you work, the sooner your skills improve. Then the virtuous circle takes over. As your skills grow, you get a rush of self-confidence, which spurs you to continue working, and your skills increase all the faster. Practice pays off more when you concentrate while you’re doing it. But that’s harder than it sounds. In shooting practice, there’s no crowd; sometimes it’s just you, the ball, and the basket. In order to hit twenty-five in a row in high school, I had to concentrate, think about what I was doing, and get the feel for all the elements involved—the legs, the elbow, the follow-through. My mind was focused on each attempt. I was grooving my shot.
By the time I was twenty-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.
As difficult as individual discipline is, it pales next to team demands. Hitting the open man with the pass and staying with a pattern or play until its conclusion require uncommon self-control. It takes real character to derive enjoyment from the pass that leads to the pass that leads to the basket. If one player fails to make the interim pass, to block out for a rebound, or to take the open shot, it affects the whole team. Coach Jerry Sloan’s Utah Jazz and Pat Summitt’s Tennessee Lady Vols epitomize seamless team offense.
A man-to-man defense requires team discipline too. There’s no such thing as “I stopped my man” if three other opposing players scored at will. When a player goes for a steal and misses, his teammates have to pick up his man quickly. When a player covers for the teammate making the steal attempt, another teammate has to move over and cover for the one helping the stealer. 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.
Determination sits at the core of discipline, and the will to excel sits at the core of determination. You don’t have to be a pro to learn that lesson from basketball. When I failed as a rookie guard in the NBA, my desire to succeed placed a resolute grid of practice over my entire off-season. I had known in high school and college how it felt to be regarded as the best. I preferred that feeling to the sense of failure I had after my first pro year. Only later did I realize that I had worked all summer not just to hone my skills but to regain my self-respect.
In 1973, the Knicks played the Celtics for the NBA Eastern Conference Championship. We lost the sixth game, in New York, sending the final game back to Boston, where the Celtics had never lost the seventh game of a playoff—ever. The day before the game, Ned Irish, the president of the Knicks, made one of his very rare appearances at practice. He said, partly in anger and partly out of calculation, that we should be ashamed of ourselves, that we had had a great year within our grasp but had thrown it all away the night before. He ended by saying that we didn’t have much of a chance in Boston. Some teams would have quit on themselves at this point, but Irish’s scathing commentary fired us up. The next day we played one of our best-disciplined defensive games, and we won not only the game but the NBA championship that year as well.
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.
“HELP SOMEONE ELSE, HELP YOURSELF”
SELFLESSNESS
Part of the beauty and mystery of basketball rests in the variety of its team requirements. Championships are not won unless a team has forged a high degree of unity, attainable only through the selflessness of each of its players. It is in the moves that the uninitiated often don’t see that the sport has its deepest currents: the perfect screen, the purposeful movement away from the ball, the well-executed boxout, the deflected pass. Statistics don’t always measure teamwork; holding the person you’re guarding scoreless doesn’t show up in your stats. But when you’re “taking care of business,” you’re working to produce a championship team, and “We won” comes to mean more and lasts longer than the ephemeral “I scored.” Solidarity becomes an essential part of your professionalism.
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. Players must have sufficient self-knowledge to take the long view—to see that what any one player can do alone will never equal what a team can do together.
All players, even the greatest, sometimes get out of sync with the rhythm and purpose of the team. By the time Michael Jordan came back to basketball from his year of baseball, the Chicago Bulls had hired nine new players. Michael didn’t have time to synchronize his game with theirs. In the 1995 playoffs, he tried to do it all himself, and the new guys were content to watch “The Michael Show.” The result was convincing proof that one man can’t beat five. 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.
Defense is where team basketball begins. When Red Holzman took over as coach of the New York Knicks in the winter of 1967, he made the point clearly by calling twenty-three practices in twenty-three days, and two thirds of that time was taken up by defense. This was his way of bringing some unity to a group of very disparate individuals. “See the ball!” he would shout—in other words, don’t be so absorbed in guarding your own man that you don’t see when a teammate needs assistance guarding his. Phil Jackson had similar concerns when he took over as coach of the Bulls in 1989. By getting his players to keep the ball in sight at the same time they overplayed their men, he was able to move help from the weak side whenever it was needed. Slowly he got them to realize how much better they were as a group when they helped each other. By emphasizing defense as the core strength of the team, he was able to show the other players that Michael Jordan was only one fifth of the effort (even if Jordan’s fifth was spectacular).
There is nothing as exciting in basketball as a team that knows how to apply defensive pressure, either through a full-court press or a trapping half-court press. That’s when offense flows out of defense, when a few steals, turnovers, or intercepted passes can change the w
hole momentum of a game. The University of Kentucky won the NCAA tournament in 1998 in part because it was a team that knew how to press. During the 1970 championship season, in a regular season game against the Cincinnati Royals, the Knicks were behind 5 points with seventeen seconds to go in the fourth quarter. Willis Reed hit two foul shots. Suddenly DeBusschere intercepted an inbounds pass and dunked the ball for 2 points. Then Frazier recovered a loose ball, was fouled, and hit two foul shots for our eighteenth win in a row.
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.
GIVING AND GETTING
RESPECT
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 twent
y-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.
