David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants Read Online Free PDF Page A

and astute passers. Even Ranadivé readily admitted as much. All an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back. The girls were not good enough to handle a taste of their own medicine. But all those objections miss the point. If Ranadivé’s girls or Fordham’s scrappy overachievers had played the conventional way, they would have lost by thirty points. The press was the best chance the underdog had of beating Goliath. Logically, every team that comes in as an underdog should play that way, shouldn’t they? So why don’t they?
    Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time, underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the 202 lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe-to-toe with Goliath the conventional way 152 times—and lost 119 times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures is endless. In the 1940s, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedeviled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in Violent Politics, a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”
    It makes no sense, unless you think back to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through snake-infested desert on the back of camels. It is easier and far more satisfying to retreat and compose yourself after every score—and execute perfectly choreographed plays—than to swarm about, arms flailing, and contest every inch of the basketball court. Underdog strategies are hard.
    The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that famous game between Fordham and the University of Massachusetts was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, more than four decades later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”
    Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and he used the press to take the school to its first NCAA tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. Again and again, in his career, Pitino has achieved extraordinary things with a fraction of the talent of his competitors.
    “I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. He is now the head basketball coach at the University of Louisville, and Louisville has become the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat