Free Values of the Game by Bill Bradley Page B

and still manage to dig deep and find our second wind. It is a kind of toughness. Each life blow no longer shatters us like a hammer hitting brick; rather, it makes us stronger. It tempers us, like a hammer hitting metal. Imagine the comfort in knowing that by never giving up, by accepting the bad breaks and going on, you will have lived life to the fullest, and maybe will have lived it a little longer. Such peace of mind is often reward enough.

DREAMING UP THE GAME
IMAGINATION
    The innovators in basketball came upon their ideas through trial and error, by playing the game. Hank Luisetti of Stanford was the first player to shoot with one hand; before that, all basketball shots except the layup and the hook were two-handed. Joe Fulks of the Philadelphia Warriors concluded that he could get the edge on his opponent if he jumped and shot the ball from the top of his leap, and the jump shot was born. In the 1950s, Bob Cousy began passing the ball behind his back. He was considered a hot dog by traditionalists, but like most innovators he persisted because he believed in his idea—besides, the crowds loved it. Gradually, coaches saw that the efficiency and deceptiveness of the move paid off in easier baskets for teammates. About that time, Elgin Baylor entered the pro ranks. Baylor’s tremendous leaping ability allowed him to combine the jump shot and layup; he was the first player who seemed to hang in air, defying gravity. Julius Erving and Michael Jordan are his direct descendants. Even kids with no leaping ability (myself included—the joke on the Knicks was that my peak leap equaled the thickness of a Sunday
New York Times
) tried to imitate Elgin as he moved around the basket, altering his shot by changing the ball from hand to hand and using the rim on layups to block his defender’s attempt to reach the ball.
    Innovation took place mainly on offense until Bill Russell and K. C. Jones arrived on the scene in the mid-fifties. As teammates on consecutive national championship teams at the University of San Francisco, and then on the Celtics championship teams, they changed the meaning of defense in basketball. Before them, it was like counterpunching in boxing: The offense would make a move and the defense would respond to it. Russell and Jones forced the offense to react. “K. C. thought differently,” Russell wrote in his book,
Second Wind:
    “He was always figuring ways he could make the opponent take the shot he wanted him to take when he wanted him to take it, from the place he wanted the man to shoot. Often during games, he would pretend to stumble into my man while letting the player he was guarding have a free drive to the basket with the ball, knowing that I could block the shot and take the ball away. Or, he’d let a man have an outside shot from just beyond the perimeter of his effectiveness and, instead of harassing the player, would take off down the court, figuring that I’d get the rebound and throw him a long pass for an easy basket.”
    Russell in particular was a master of invention. Having concluded that horizontal lines defined the game better than vertical ones (notwithstanding the fact that more and more players were jumping higher), he was always conscious of the angle at which he did anything on the court. If he had to block a shot from behind on a man streaking for a breakaway layup, he would take a step to the left so that he could come from behind at an angle that would allow his left arm to block the shot and his body to land to the shooter’s right, thereby avoiding the collision that would have earned him a foul. If he was attempting to block a jump shot, he tried to do it during the first foot of the ball’s arc, which meant that his body had to be close to the shooter’s body in the air; and he used a vertical leap with outstretched arms because that created fewer fouls than a leap forward, which would have carried his body into the shooter. He also knew that while a blocked shot