Free How to Be Like Mike by Pat Williams Page B

late, who work dutifully, who implement an intelligent plan, are so often more lauded than those with twice the talent.
    “When Michael was in high school, he’d arrive early at school and get the janitor to let him in the gym to shoot,” said Wilmington, North Carolina, sportswriter Chuck Caree. “The athletic director would have to run him out of the gym and tell him to go to class.”
    A study once tracked the careers of a group of elite violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. What it revealed is not surprising:By the time the students were eighteen, the best musicians had spent, on average, two thousand more hours in practice than their fellow students.
    There is value in repetition, as tedious as it may seem. It’s what makes the miraculous seem effortless, what gilds the reputation of our most remarkable athletes.
    “Great players never look in the mirror and think, ‘I’m a great basketball player,” ’ Jordan said. “You ask yourself, ‘Am I the best player I can be?”’
    Pete Maravich would practice his basketball skills for eight hours during the summers as a kid, shooting in steamy hundred-degree gyms, throwing five hundred behind-the-back passes each day, grimacing through quickness and speed drills. Ben Hogan, perhaps the most notoriously relentless worker in the history of golf, would, as a club pro in Pennsylvania, hit 150 balls, play six holes, then go back and hit a few hundred more. MuhammadAli would run until it hurt, and then keep running, pushing himself into a realm of strength and stamina that most of us never taste. “What counts in the ring,” he said, “is what you can do after you’re tired.” Ted Williams once said, “The key to hitting is just plain working at it. Work, that’s the real secret.”
    Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production and accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
    —Thomas Edison
    We saw what a fatigued Jordan could do, saw it in the final minutes of games, his bald head shimmering with rivulets of sweat, hands tugging at the ends of his baggy shorts while awaiting a free throw. Dead, then alive, legs lifting off for one last jump shot, body exploding on one final drive toward the basket. That last burst of energy in the final minutes of games was not some divine gift, not an extra wrinkle of Jordan’s extraordinary athleticism. This was a premeditated moment, a product of every extended workout. Even when he played baseball, Jordan was the hardest-working player on his team, up at 6:30 A. M. during spring training, arriving in the predawn darkness with hitting coach Walt Hriniak, swinging a bat until his hands tore apart and bled, taping them up and swinging until he bled again.
    I believe you can accomplish more in forty-five minutes of practice if you work hard than you can in two hours if you don’t train properly.
    —Jesse Owens
O LYMPIC GREAT
    “He’d hit early in the afternoon, then take regular batting practice, then hit in the cages before the game and then hit after the game,” said Birmingham Barons hitting coach Mike Barnett. “He was starved for information. By August, he’d made himself into a very good hitter.”
    “I’m not out there sweating for three hours every day,” Jordan said, “just to find out what it feels like to sweat.”
    “He plays as hard—or harder—in practice than he’s ever played in games,” Jordan’s Nike representative, Howard White, once said. “He wants to make the game easier than practice.”
    That’s the other thing about Jordan: Every moment of work led toward an objective. It wasn’t just blind labor. It was all part of a grander design.
    Michael once observed, “I enjoyed dunking, but I worked much harder on shooting and defense. Again, I know I helped increase the popularity of the dunk and playing above the rim,