Malcolm Gladwell, whose triple-header of best-sellers, leaves the rest of us poor-schlep authors, well and gladly, speechless, has a thought-provoker in this week's New Yorker that's causing quite the dust-up around the old hoops. "How David Beats Goliath" uses a team of 12-year-old basketball players as its central trope.
The girls are not the world's best basketball players. They're not the fastest or the tallest or the anything-est other than this: they play against the conventional rules. They maintain a full-court press for the whole game, which Gladwell documents as being counter to popular wisdom except in certain unusual situations--like when the team has been coached by Rick Pitino, the legendary winning University of Kentucky coach (as well as having a less-than-stellar career as the coach of our beloved Boston Celtics).
Anyone who plays or watches basketball (ahem) knows that the full-court press is reserved for the clutch. Keeping up that amount of pressure for four periods is exhausting even to think about, changing the rhythm of the game to resemble something closer to ice hockey than the elegant dribble-down-the-court choreography of traditional basketball.
Basketball-bloggers are taking Gladwell apart for his lack of knowledge of the game, even dissecting his facts. According to one enraged commenter, Gladwell's contention that only one of Pitino's players went to the NBA is truly off the mark - apparently, a whole slew of them did. I could go on with how up-in-their-nets the basketballers are about the article but that would only prevent my getting to my opinion.
Basketball aside, Gladwell's key point -- and what I took to be the theme of this whole issue of The New Yorker, whether intentional or not -- is that "when underdogs break the rules," the article's subtitle, they win.
Underdogs are relentless. They try things no one else thinks of - like Lawrence of Arabia who suffered through 600 miles of desert to overwhelm (and surprise) the Ottomans. Who does that--rides camels, sleeps near cobras, and survives essentially without water? Underdogs.
Likewise, one small David, who stunned one big Goliath by realizing that he'd never win through traditional warfare but needed something completely different. And thus was born guerrilla warfare (and I say this knowing the military historians will be as upset as the basketball mavens).
I'm closing in on my conclusion here. What leapt out of Gladwell's article time and again was the notion that unlikely winners are relentless. He only uses the word twice in the article but its underlying them is, shall we say, relentless. Fits with one of Gladwell's conclusions about "outliers," those among us who are truly extraordinary. They practice. And practice. And practice. Whether circumstances are advantageous or onerous. Even the Beatles practiced, Gladwell says in this Fora.TV interview, "who before they came to America and take the world by storm in 1964, they spend this incredibly long period of time as a house band in a strip club in Hamburg...playing eight hour sets seven days a week for months at a stretch." (Who knew?) The Beatles were relentless. They practiced.
Get back to work, everyone. And read the article. It's no more about basketball than it is about Alan Greenspan, real-time processing, or puff adders, all of which figure prominently as well.
