Chasing Perfect Read online

  In every other sport, the idea is essentially the same. Put together enough good drives, possessions, touches, at-bats, rallies, whatever, and you’re in strong shape. Allow the other team to win the bulk of these tiny battles, and you’re weak, exposed. Doesn’t get any more bottom line than that, and when I started out as a player, and even as a coach, this was the way I approached each game. Didn’t matter if we were in a pickup game on the playground, or in a rec league game, or in a revenge-type game against a bitter collegiate rival. Over hundreds and hundreds of games, the idea was to help our guys put together more “good” possessions than the other guys. Didn’t matter if we edged out the other team by a single basket, a single point, as long as we found a way to win the game.

  So that was always the goal—to play well enough to win, even if it meant playing just well enough to win. After all, who really cares if you win on a last-second shot or going away? Who really cares if you’re trailing at the end of the third quarter but find a way to battle back and come out on top? A win is a win.

  Over a long season, the same principle applied. It was okay to lose a game or two, or even seven or eight, as long as you won more than you lost, and more than the other teams in your bracket, division, league, region. Don’t get me wrong: I hate to lose. Always have, always will. But you could find a way to absorb each loss and maybe even learn from it. Over the long slog of a season, a couple losses here and there didn’t much matter. If you could make it to the postseason or the elimination rounds of a championship tournament, it only mattered that you put yourself in position to win. It only mattered that you were playing well and that all of your players were coming together and working as a team. Like the 2011 New York Giants, on their way to Super Bowl XLVI. As I write this, it feels like the entire New York metropolitan area is still buzzing with the Giants’ big win, but hardly anybody seems to care or even remember that the Giants were a mediocre 7–7 with just two weeks to go in the regular season. They’d gotten off to a promising start, and then lost a bunch of games, and in early December their won-loss record showed that they were as good as they were bad. At the time, few people in and around football thought they had anything but a long-shot chance to make it to the postseason, let alone the Super Bowl. But they won their final two games of the regular season, squeaked into the playoffs, and somehow managed to pick up steam along the way. Each week they got better, stronger, tougher to beat. And against those long-shot odds, they made it all the way to the Super Bowl, where it no longer mattered that they’d been 7–7. They belonged on that field in Indianapolis, on football’s biggest stage, just as much as their opponents, the New England Patriots, belonged on that same field. Didn’t matter how either team got there, just that they were there, and you could even make the point that the Giants were better prepared for the Super Bowl than the Patriots, simply because of everything they had to go through just to get there. It’s like Tom Coughlin and his coaching staff had taken all of the team’s midseason and late-season struggles and used them to motivate their players. To get them thinking they were a better team on the back of what they’d endured.

  The idea, by every measure, is to come out ahead. That’s all. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s everything. And that’s always been the way of it—in sports, at work, in life. To do just a little bit more, a little bit better. To make it to the next round. It’s like that old joke about a group of guys, sitting around a campfire, talking about which one of them could outrun a bear. They went around the group, and all agreed that not a single one of them was faster than the full-grown bears who roamed those woods. But one guy in the group wasn’t too worried about this. He liked his chances, in the unlikely event that a bear might show up and start chasing them. He turned to his buddies and said, “I don’t have to be faster than the bear. I just have to be faster than all of you.”

  This was true enough. All this one guy had to do was outrun the guy next to him, and he’d make it to the next round; if another bear showed up the next day, our guy just had to outrun whoever was left. Again, it doesn’t much matter if you come out ahead by a mile or a hair, just as long as you’re ahead of the other guys in the pack running for their lives, same as you. And so, for the longest time, this was how I played and coached. As long as my team could find a way to get and keep ahead of the other team on the floor, the other teams competing with us in the standings, the other teams chasing the same title, we were doing okay. All we had to do was stay ahead of the field and worry about the bear later.

  But then something happened to change my approach. I can’t say for sure how or why it happened, but it happened. I didn’t go looking for it, didn’t even see it coming, but there it was. One day, middle of my first season as head coach of the boys’ varsity basketball team at St. Anthony, losing even just one game seemed to suddenly matter. The slightest misstep seemed to suddenly matter. Winning big, instead of just winning at all, seemed to suddenly matter. Dominating, from wire to wire. Making a statement with every possession. Playing all out, all the time, without letup … these things seemed to matter more than ever before. To me. To my players. To a culture of St. Anthony basketball that seemed to spring up around our program. Without really realizing it, without really meaning for it to happen in just this way, our view of the game took on new shape, and I don’t think it started with me. I don’t think it started with my players either. There was just something in the air, in and around St. Anthony, left us feeling like we couldn’t afford to lose. At all. Ever.

  I don’t know that this was a good thing or a bad thing, but I had to pay attention to it. I had to find a way to understand this shift and put it to work for us, to make sure we didn’t start playing tight, tentative. Like we were afraid to lose instead of hungry to win.

  Looking back, I can trace this shift in approach to the 1971–72 season, my last year as head coach of the junior varsity. We were undefeated that year, 20–0, and the talk among my players, away from the gym, was about not screwing up. The tone of all this talk was more about playing it safe than about putting it all out there. Nobody wanted to be on the floor for our first loss, which would happen eventually, of course. Nobody wanted to be the one responsible for making a bad pass at a crucial moment that might cost us the game, or a bad decision that could turn the momentum the other way, or even a stupid mistake off the court that kept him from suiting up and doing his part to help the team. There was a pressure to not lose, to not screw up, which was not at all what I wanted. That type of attitude can get a team into all kinds of trouble, and a coach who creates that type of pressure-packed atmosphere is setting his players up for a big fall.

  But, like I said, it seemed to happen on its own.

  The following year, I moved up to coach the varsity, along with a lot of my junior varsity players, and we carried that win-at-all-costs, win-at-all-times, pressure-packed mind-set with us. At the same time, we left the seeds of that type of thinking behind, so the younger kids who were rising up to the junior varsity for the first time began to think that way too. Remember, we had that long winning streak going, so the younger players now felt responsible for that, and all the weight that came with it. It fed on itself and became a part of our culture—again, not because it was something I’d drilled into my players, but because it had somehow found them, me, us. Soon, it reached all the way down to our freshman players, and even to the little kids in town who hoped to one day play for the St. Anthony Friars, where winning was now first and foremost and above all.

  Jump ahead forty years, and you’ll still find that mind-set in our hallways at school. You’ll still hear little kids on the Jersey City playgrounds, in our summer leagues and youth programs, talking about what it means to play for St. Anthony. You’ll still get it from those kids on my first few varsity teams, now pushing sixty, who move about our gym during home games like local legends, because they never lost and they set a kind of gold standard for the way the St. Anthony Friars should play. (They’re grandparents, some of them, a
nd here I am, still thinking of them as kids.) You’ll feel it in the air and all around as our players get together each year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which back then always marked our first official practice of the season. Only now, all this time later, I think I’ve finally figured out how to harness that approach and leave my players thinking that they deserve to win each and every game instead of just expecting to win each and every game. There’s a difference. There’s a difference in the way your players carry themselves when they deserve to win. When they prepare to win. When they stop going through the motions and hoping for the best and start doing everything in their power to ensure that they’re the best.

  This book is about that difference. It’s about finding the will to win and putting it into play, and knowing that in order to achieve excellence you must first decide to pursue excellence. Success is not something that happens to you, I sometimes tell my players. You happen to it. That’s an old line, not original to me, but it’s worth repeating. (By the way, a lot of the quotes and aphorisms I share with my players are not original to me, but they’re worth repeating—so I repeat them into the ground.) Nobody sets out to pitch a perfect game, or bowl 300, or drive a golf ball from the back tees for a hole-in-one. No team ever sets out to record a perfect season. But these things happen from time to time, and each time they do you’ll find an athlete or a group of athletes who have fully prepared for these things to happen.

  They’ve been preparing for them all along.

  1.

  A Sense of Where You’re Going

  LIFE IS A UNITED EFFORT OF MANY.

  —John Wooden

  I TELL KIDS TO PURSUE THEIR BASKETBALL DREAMS, BUT I TELL THEM TO NOT LET THAT BE THEIR ONLY DREAM.

  —Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  I don’t have a first basketball memory. There was always basketball, going back as far as I know. Where I grew up, in Jersey City, it was our whole world. Wasn’t just basketball. We played all kinds of ball, but basketball was what stuck, what mattered. Now that I think back on it, there was always a basketball nearby. In my hands. On my bed. Under the kitchen table. That’s one of the great things about basketball. Doesn’t take much to work on your game. Football, baseball, you need someone else to play with, even if it’s just someone to throw to. But with basketball, all you need is to grab your ball and play. Don’t even need a hoop. Just a ball and a little bit of imagination.

  I played a ton of street basketball as a kid. Soon as I was big enough to reach the basket, I found a way to get into the game—and there was always a game. On some courts, there’d be better, bigger games than on others, and our thing was to always find the best game. Sometimes that meant waiting a good long while until our turn came around, and when that happened you can bet we didn’t want to lose. The rule of the streets where I grew up was the same as anywhere else: if you won, you kept playing; if you lost, you’d have to slink back in line and wait your turn all over again. So, yeah, we played to win. And it wasn’t just about winning. You had to do it against real competition. You had to push yourself. Otherwise, what was the point?

  The first real game I ever played was against the Jersey City Boys’ Club, when our St. Paul’s CYO team came to play against the Boys’ Club house team. To me, it was like suiting up in Madison Square Garden. It was December 1960. I remember the year because it was just before high school. I was thirteen years old, and it’s like it was yesterday. I can still hear the referee’s whistle. I don’t think I ever played in a game with a referee before this one, and just about every time I heard that whistle it was for me. Why? Because I didn’t know the three-second rule. Most of the courts I played on didn’t even have a three-second lane—just a faded-over hash mark for a foul line—so how the hell was I supposed to know you couldn’t clog the lane and wait for something good to happen? Some games, when we had a height advantage, this was our whole damn strategy, and here I was learning on the fly that it was a violation. My coach kept yelling at me, “Three seconds! Three seconds!” At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I figured it out soon enough. I was a quick study—but not so quick the ref didn’t string me up a bunch of times. Third or fourth whistle, I stopped counting, but then I got the hang of it.

  Okay, Hurley. Can’t park yourself in the paint. Gotta keep moving.…

  There was a lot I didn’t know, going into that first grammar school season. Oh man, I was awful … but I got better as I went along. Our coach was a guy named Charlie Shaughnessy, and I liked him a whole lot. He was a young guy from the neighborhood, just out of college, and he couldn’t have been nicer or more patient with us. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know the real rules of the game, but Charlie broke it down and made it something we could get our heads around. He had a kind demeanor, and he was fun to be around, but at the same time he had our full attention. He commanded respect, and we were happy to give it to him.

  By the end of the season he could see I was a player—or at least that I was serious about being a player. Wasn’t there yet, but I guess I was on my way. He could see the game meant something to me, so he took me aside after our final game and gave it to me straight. He said, “Hurley, if you want to make the freshman team, you’ve got to work on your left hand.”

  I was planning to go to St. Peter’s Prep, which had a very strong basketball program. Charlie knew that I was hoping to play ball there, and he knew what it would take, so I appreciated the advice. I didn’t hear it as a knock on my game, just a way I could lift myself up and take my game to the next level. Something to work on over the summer, to get ready for the season, and it really rang in my head.

  This goes back to what I always loved about the game of basketball, because I could take those words from a guy like Charlie Shaughnessy and do something about them. I could take my ball and go to the park or the rec gyms and just play, nonstop. I could dribble that ball up and down the street with my left hand all day long. I could sit with it on the couch in the living room and pass it back and forth between my hands, just to get a good, consistent feel, an easy handle. The only thing that could stop me was … well, me. If I wanted it, all I had to do was reach for it, commit to it. And it’s not like I was going it alone. Finally, after all those years playing ball and not really knowing what I was doing, I had a coach give me some direction—and I took that direction and ran with it. I spent every single day of that summer playing ball, working on my left hand—usually in the playground on my street, or in the courtyard behind St. Paul’s, where there was a constant game going. I’d grab my ball and head out to this or that court, dribbling the whole way there, always with my left hand. If you ran into me that summer, chances ran good to great I had a ball in my hands. Every day I played at least three hours. Sometimes a whole lot more. The only days I missed were when we went away for a week to Long Beach Island, for a family vacation on the Jersey shore, but even then I took my ball and found a place to play, and the whole time Charlie’s words were ringing in my head: “You’ve got to work on your left hand.”

  So that’s what I did. I worked and worked and worked. I did everything I could imagine to strengthen my left hand, to make it as comfortable on the ball as my right hand, my natural hand. It got to where I couldn’t tell one from the other. They were just on different sides. Whatever it was I needed to do on the court—dribble, shoot, pass—I could do it just as well with my left hand as my right, and I showed up at St. Peter’s for our preseason workouts thinking I’d put myself in good position to catch the coach’s attention. It’s not like he was about to marvel at my height. In ninth grade, I was only about five-four. That’s nothing for a basketball player—nothing to get you noticed anyway. That’s why Charlie put it in my head to work on my left hand, because when you’re five-four you’ve got to be strong on the dribble, from both sides. You’ve got to be able to handle the ball in a way the coach can notice and appreciate. There were a hundred kids trying out for that freshman team, so if I went in there and announced my limitations
, I’d get cut.

  During tryouts, the freshman coach came up to me and paid me the biggest compliment I’d ever hear as a player. His name was Damian Halligan, and he’d found something to like in my game enough to seek me out. He came over to me and said, “You a righty or a lefty?”

  Those words were like magic, and it was the first time I realized the impact a coach could have on a player. Over the years the situation would flip and I’d be on the other side of the conversation, but here I was on the receiving end. Before this, I didn’t really have a clue what it meant to coach a kid, other than to set plays or make defensive assignments or bark out instructions from the sidelines. But here I’d taken the advice of a man I liked and admired and resolved to act on it. Here I’d gone from a kid who loved basketball, same as I loved every other sport, to a kid with purpose and motivation to make myself a player. Not just a kid who played, but a player, and it was all on the back of Charlie Shaughnessy’s push. He knew I looked up to him. He knew I’d listen to what he had to say.

  And I did. Thank God, I did.

  But then I went and grew that push into something else. Something bigger. It didn’t happen right away, but it got me thinking about the game in a whole new way. It got me to set aside all those other sports and concentrate on basketball. And most important, it got me to appreciate the positive influence a good coach could bring to a young player. Like I said, I was a late grower, but it wasn’t just in terms of height. I was late to mature as a player, basically because I was late to taking the game seriously, to taking myself seriously, and it’s only now I’m realizing that the kids I’ve enjoyed working with the most over the years have been the ones who were most like me. The ones who came late to the game. The ones who are open enough to believe you when you tell them their bodies will catch up to them, or that if they work on something it’ll change their game. And I can say this to them with authority, from a place of experience, because that’s how it was with me. You can have all the natural ability in the world, but if you don’t know what to do with it you’re nowhere. If you’re not willing to work at it, you’re nowhere.