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

Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if their players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight percent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instructions—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who come to Louisville sit in the stands and watch that ceaseless activity and despair. To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough. But Ranadivé? Oh, he was desperate. You would think, looking at his girls, that their complete inability to pass and dribble and shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible.

5.
    One of the things that happened to Redwood City the minute the team started winning basketball games was that opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of youth basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Ranadivé’s girls, they felt, were not really playing basketball. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press, a twelve-year-old girl learned much more valuable lessons—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.
    “There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”
    Roger Craig said that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs, ‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”
    “One time, we were playing this team from East San Jose,” Ranadivé said. “They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age, the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head. You should never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw the guy out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”
    All the qualities that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and finely calibrated execution. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable: a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out-of-bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.
    T. E. Lawrence could triumph because he was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from the top English military academy. He was an archaeologist by trade who wrote dreamy prose. He wore sandals and full Bedouin