Your Blood Turns to What?

Editor’s Note: I swear I wrote this episode last week, prior to Gladwell and Simmons breaking this down in more detail. I finished it up on Friday but thanks to my new paranoia about posting at work, didn’t put it up until today. Why not post it over the weekend you ask? Well, I left my laptop at work because I was going out to happy hour and A) I hate lugging around a laptop all night and more importantly B) there’s a good chance I’m going to get obliterated and leave it at a bar. So it’s waited until now. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask my dad if I called him in February and said, “Kansas-Missouri is on CBS today. I’m looking forward to watching it because Missouri presses like crazy.” My biggest concern now is that my one definitive thing I would do if and when I decide I’m tired of working 12 hour days, saying “F it” and just going to coach high school ball is that now too many coaches know about this secret. I wasn’t concerned about the original piece because really, how many coaches read the New Yorker. But I assume many of them read Simmons.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

It’s not that often that I’ll ever link to something from The New Yorker (well la de da Mr. Fancy Pants) and even less likely I’ll be able to add something to a Malcolm Gladwell piece (The Tipping Point and Outliers were great. Blink was ok.), so I have to take advantage of it while I can.

If you don’t know, my high school basketball team employed a system similar to the one mentioned in this piece. We pressed the entire 32 minutes unless we were up by 25+ when we called of the dogs. In this time, we won 3 conference championships in my four years. My freshman year, I was on the JV, but the varsity actually had talented individuals, two which were recruited D1. They didn’t lose a regular season game and were top 10 in the NY metro region (which includes an area inhabited by about 12 million individuals). They ended up getting upset in the playoffs after one of their stars was suspended for stealing chicken from a supermarket (I’m not making that up). My sophomore year, I moved up to varsity to sit the bench, and even though we only returned one starter, we won the conference again. Junior year was a rebuilding year where we finished just a shade over .500. My senior year, starting one person over 6 feet, we won the conference championship again. And again we were upset in the playoffs because our power forward and only one with actual D1 potential was off his game because he spent a few days leading up to the game in county for being one of the first examples of tougher animal cruelty laws (Again, not making this up. He ordered his pitbull to kill a cat and spent time in lock up for it. He was Ookie before there was Ookie). Long story short, we won games because we pressed all game.

Gladwell emphasizes that this is a strategic thing in that opposing players are confused as to how they should attack this new defense. Yeah, once a year we’d get one of those teams that didn’t know what to do and we’d be up 25-4 at the quarter. For the most part though, by the time you get to high school, you should know how to break a basic press. Ours wasn’t that fancy, we just went to an area, guarded the person closest to us, and then denied them a clean entry pass. The same as the team in the article, we left the inbounder free and had our 5 man run back to protect a home run pass over the top. One they got the ball inbounds though, that’s where the fanciness stopped. All we were doing after you got it in was playing man to man full court. In the half court, it went to the very exotic “deny if they’re one pass away, if not, help like crazy” defense. So it’s not like we were reinventing the wheel here. And judging by the above stories about some of my teammates, I think this was about as much information that they could process.

How did we win games then? Because we just wore teams down. Our coach used to have a saying (we’ll get to some of his other saying later), “It’s like Mike Tyson used to say about people fighting him. Everyone has a plan, until they get hit.” You can game plan all you want for us. It will probably take you 15 minutes to establish one foolproof inbounds pass. But what you can’t simulate is having to work just to get the ball inbounds, then having to deal with a hand in your face walking the ball up and then get into some sort of offense for a full 32 minutes. I can’t tell you how many teams started off with no problems. 2nd half though, they started getting lazy. Point guards not wanting to bring the ball up and just wanting to get the ball out of their hands because they were tired. I remember one playoff game and just kicking our ass the first quarter. They were playing tough half court defense and we couldn’t get anything going. 2nd quarter, they switch to a zone. Why? I have no idea, but I’m assuming they realized they couldn’t play tough d and deal with our pressure all game. So they ended up giving back a 15 point lead or something like that. There was the other game where a team was up 10 with four minutes to go, our best player had fouled out, and yet we still one because the other team just stopped getting back on defense.

So where is this all going? My high school coach’s greatest one liners. We had to be the only team in history who enjoyed film sessions. Because it would just turn into a snap session half the time.

To the jacked up guy: “You know you go the big muscles, all strong. But when you go out there, you’re blood turns to pee pee.”

To question his teams commitment to basketball: “You know, we got guys not playing for a variety of reasons…failing classes…want to spend more time with their girl…(looking directly at the one kid who got grazed by a bullet in the head over the summer)...gettin’ shot in the head.”

For motivational tactics, he passed out a copy of the cover of a magazine magazine with a listing of All Americans his senior year. Wilt’s on the cover and he’s one of the other guys with a smaller picture: “Just to show you I used to be able to play back in the day and I’m not full of shit.”

After my first concussion in high school: (Holds up 5 fingers, except he had his ring finger amputated because of a football injury (think Ronnie Lott)) “How many fingers am I holding up?”Me: 5
Coach: “Nope, four and a half. You’re not playing tonight.”

Coach: (After a tough loss on a Friday night) “Ok, practice tomorrow at 8. Who can’t make it?”
Player: “Me coach.”
Coach: (pissed off) “Why not?”
Player: “My girl’s going into labor.”
Coach: “Oh ok. (without missing a beat) You gonna name him after me?”

The Mike Tyson line was a thing of pure genius because if there’s anything to make high school boys think they can conquer the world, comparing them to Mike Tyson will do it. Of course, you have the other side of the coin where they think it’s ok to steal chicken, kill cats and all of that. Ah well, a small price to pay.