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CHAPTER 1
PURE PLEASURE, PURE JOY
PASSION
You begin by bouncing a ball — in the house, on the driveway, along the sidewalk, at the playground. Then you start shooting: legs bent, eyes on the rim, elbow under the ball. You shoot and follow through. Let it fly, up, up and in. No equipment is needed beyond a ball, a rim, and imagination. How simple the basic act is. I'm not sure exactly when my interest turned to passion, but I was very young, and it has never diminished.
When I was a teenager, alone in the high school gym for hours, the repetition of shooting, shot after shot, became a kind of ritual for me. The seams and the grain of the leather ball had to feel a certain way. My fingertips went right to the grooves and told me if it felt right. The key to the fingertips was keeping them clean. I would rub my right hand to my sweaty brow, then against my T-shirt at chest level, and then I would cradle the ball. By the end of shooting practice, the grime had made its way from the floor to the ball to my fingertips to my shirt. After thousands of shots, my shirts were permanently stained.
The gymnasium itself was a part of my solitary joy. I took in every nuance of the place. It was a state-of-the-art facility, with retractable fan-shaped glass backboards. The floor was polished and shining; when I moved, it glistened as if I were playing on a mirror. The only daylight streamed in from windows high along the sloping ceiling. The smell was not of locker room mildew but of pungent varnish and slightly oiled mops, the guarantors of floor quality throughout the years. The gym's janitor insisted on one absolute rule: no street shoes allowed on the floor. It was sacred terrain, traversable only by the soft soles of Converse or Keds.
Then there were the sounds. Thwat, thwat! The ball hit the floor and the popping sound echoed from the steel beams of the ceiling and the collapsed wooden stands that stacked up twenty feet high. Thwat, thwat, squeak — the squeal of your sneakers against the floor, followed by the jump and then the shot. The swish of the ball through the net, a sound sweeter than the roar of the crowd. Swish. Thwat, thwat, squeak, swish!
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. I played until my muscles stiffened and my arms ached. I persevered through blisters, contusions, and strained joints. When I got home I had to take a nap before I could muster the energy to eat the dinner that sat in the oven. After one Friday night high school game, which we lost to our arch rival, I was back in the gym at nine on Saturday morning, with the bleachers still deployed and the popcorn boxes scattered beneath them, soaking my defeat by shooting. Others had been in this place last night, I thought, but now I was here by myself, and I was home.
When I practiced alone, I often conjured up the wider world of basketball. Maybe I had just seen the Los Angeles Lakers play on TV the day before; I'd try to remember a particular move that Laker forward Elgin Baylor had made, then imitate it. I would simulate the whole game in my mind, including the spiel of the announcer. "Five seconds left, four seconds, three, Bradley dribbles right in heavy traffic, jumps, shoots — good at the buzzer!" I dreamed that someday I'd experience that moment for real, maybe even take the clutch shot in the state finals. In my dream, of course, I'd hit it and we'd be state champions.
The passion of solitary practice was matched by the joy of playing team ball. The constant kaleidoscope of team play was infinitely interesting to me. For every challenge thrown up by the defense, there was an offensive counter. Having the court sense to recognize this in the flow of the game produced a real high. The notion that someday I could be paid to play a game I loved never occurred to me.
You could always tell that Magic Johnson loved to play. He smiled, grimaced, and pushed himself and his teammates. His gusto honored the game. Some players these days seem more angry than joyful, yet the great ones still have a zest. Grant Hill's pleasure comes from his game's completeness and his own unflappable composure. Hakeem Olajuwon exudes a delighted confidence when the ball goes into him at the low post. Clyde Drexler, like Dr. J in earlier years, conveys an effortless joy when he has the ball in open court and heads for the basket.
Even the controversial Dennis Rodman evinces a love of the game despite his antics. His game within the game is rebounding. He studies films to see which way a shooter's shot usually bounces. He keeps his body in top shape. He uses his body only after he uses his brain and his eyes, and then he makes a second, third, and fourth effort. When he gets the ball, he smiles the smile of someone dedicated to something well beyond himself.
The women's game in particular is full of a kind of beautiful enthusiasm. On many teams each player seems deeply involved in her teammates' spirits as well as their play. I used to love to watch Kate Starbird spark her Stanford team with her tenacity, intensity, and 3- point-shooting skill, but the epitome, for me, is Chamique Holdsclaw of Tennessee, the female Michael Jordan. She has a winning combination of zeal and ability that allows her to generate excitement in the crowd, dedication among her teammates, and fear in the minds of her opponents. Her sheer love of the game becomes infectious.
Imagine what happens when you've got an entire team of players who are passionate about the game. In my Knicks days, there was no feeling comparable to the one I got when the team's game came together — those nights when five guys moved as one. The moment was one of beautiful isolation, the result of the correct blending of human forces at the proper time and to the exact degree. With my team, before the crowd, against our opponents, it was almost as if this were my private world and no one else could sense the inexorable rightness of the moment.
The Knicks 1973 championship was more fun for me than the initial one in 1970. We weren't under the pressure of trying to achieve a first championship. The team itself was more congenial; the variety of plays was greater. I had a secure position as a starter. The obstacles that had once blocked my pure enjoyment of the game had all been removed. The only thing I had to do was allow the kid in me to feel the pure pleasure in just playing. In plenty of games, I played simply for the joy of it, shooting and passing without thinking about points. I forgot the score, and sometimes I would go through a whole quarter without looking at the scoreboard.
I felt about the court, the ball, the basket, the way people feel about friends, so playing for money seemed to me to be compromising enough. I never made any endorsements or commercials during my NBA career. To take money for hawking basketball shoes or shaving lotion would have demeaned my experience of the game, or so I felt. Besides, I sensed that the deals were being offered because I was a "white hope" and not because of my playing ability. More than the money, the travel, the lure of the championships, it was the game itself that rewarded me.
I've told the story a thousand times about the night in the 1970s at a postgame reception in Chicago when a man approached me and asked, "Do you really like to play basketball?"
"Yeah, more than anything else I could be doing now," I replied.
"That's great. You know, I once played the trumpet," he said. "I think I know what you feel. I played in a little band. We were good. We'd play on weekends at colleges. In my last year, we had an offer to tour and make records. Everyone wanted to except me."
"Why didn't you?"
"My father thought it wasn't secure enough."
"What about you?"
"Well, I didn't know," he said. "I guess I agreed. The life is so transient. You're always on the road. No sureness that you'll get your next job. It just doesn't fit into a life plan. So I went to law school and I quit playing the trumpet, except every once in a while. Now I don't have time."
"Do you like the law?"
"It's okay. But it's nothing like playing the trumpet."
CHAPTER 2
THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE
DISCIPLINE
In Crystal City, Missouri, when I was growing up, my basketball heroes were Bob Pettit, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jerry West. When I was fourteen, I went to a week- long basketball camp run by Easy Ed Macauley, a forward for the St. Louis Hawks who had returned to his hometown in a trade (an epochal one, it turns out) that sent Bill Russell to the Boston Celtics. 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, given 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. I formed an obstacle course with the gym's metal folding chairs, weaving among them with a crossover dribble. I stacked chairs in towers to practice shooting hook shots over an imaginary seven-footer. Alone in the gym, I made moves to the baseline, reverse-pivoted back toward the lane, gave a head fake, then changed the ball from one hand to the other for the layup. I shot set shots and then jump shots from five different places on the floor, with the backspin often bringing the ball back to me as if it were a yo-yo on a string. I kept shooting until I had hit twenty-five in a row from each spot with the set shot and twenty-five in a row with the jump shot. If I missed number twenty-three, I started over. And above all, I played wherever there was a good game, sometimes driving twice a day to St. Louis during the summer for pickup scrimmages. When a fifteen-year-old female classmate telephoned one night to flirt, I somewhat doltishly protested that my real girlfriend was basketball.
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. My freshman year at Princeton was a struggle academically. Many of my classmates were from prep schools and had essentially covered the first year's classwork the year before; I was from a small-town high school in the Midwest and Ivy League standards were new to me and very, very difficult. Spring midterms went badly, so I quit freshman baseball — my second sport — and virtually lived in the library. I barely made it through that first year, but by my senior year, having kept up the work pattern I established out of necessity as a freshman, I achieved a respectable record.
In the U.S. Senate, along the campaign trail, or on any number of projects I became involved with after Princeton, it was the same story. I was determined that no one would outwork me. Basketball had lit that fire, and it burned in many directions. As I grew older and met my basketball heroes, and even defeated some of them, I realized that my way of doing things was not at all unique. Most of the pros had developed their skills by paying their dues in practice time. 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. When your wind is short and you have a pain in your side from running, only your mind can get you to withstand the pain and go on. As UCLA's legendary coach John Wooden says, "Nothing will work unless you do."
I used to hate getting into shape no matter which routines I followed — laps, line drills, playing one on one full court, running the floor while passing the ball back and forth with two teammates. After six weeks of agony, during which every part of my body ached so badly that many mornings I crawled from bed to bathroom to soak in a hot tub, the pain began to diminish and the muscles started to come around. When you train seriously for basketball, you learn the difference between getting into condition and getting into condition. In the lesser of those two states, you can run up and down the floor and do what you have to do without the interference of fatigue. 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. My toughest opponent, John Havlicek of the Boston Celtics, was a true genius when it came to using conditioning as a weapon. His goal was to get his opponent to give up, to stop overcoming fatigue, to stop pushing himself. Havlicek saw it as a matter of who gives up first. "You'll pass out before you're overworked, but most people don't know that," he once told Orlando Magic senior executive vice president Pat Williams. "They think they're overworked, so they stop. They could have kept going, but they didn't. They weren't beat physically; they were beat mentally."
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Values of the Game"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Bill Bradley.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
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