Values of the Game Read Free

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