Tag: Basketball

How to stay humble

May 23rd, 2024

What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?

Shooting a basketball. I’ve done that for the longest, outside of eating and breathing. I’m just not very good at it.

I started doing it when I was about eight. We moved close to a house with a hoop, and all the other kids would gather there and play. It was a social thing, and I started doing it. I kept it going in all the different places I’ve lived. The only country I couldn’t keep the habit going was Germany. But when I was living in New Zealand, I made a special point of it. It’s good exercise, it’s relaxing, you get to be outside. It’s a little cold today, but I did it yesterday, and I’ll do it tomorrow.

It’s important to repeatedly do something you’re not that good at. Most successful people are good at what they do, but if that’s all they do, they lose humility. They find it harder to understand a big chunk of the world that doesn’t have their talent or is simply mediocre. It helps you keep things in perspective.

I’m not terrible at it. I have gotten better, even recently. But no one would say I’m really good.

– Tyler Cowen

From the Modern Meditations blog.
Samuel Smiles, Seth Curry, and Aritz Aduriz, a brotherhood of opsimaths

March 6th, 2022

The most important thing to understand about Smiles is that he worked for his whole life. When he wasn’t in the office, he was pursuing his education or writing articles. This doesn’t mean he was succeeding. Often he was simply reading and learning for the sake of it. The successful books he published were the eventual result of decades of accreted labour. He studied because he wanted to. For a long time, the returns were zero.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part I, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader

That last sentence though, a pile driver – “For a long time, the returns were zero.” Writer Samuel Smiles was a model of persistence. He is what Henry Oliver calls an opsimath, or a late bloomer. (You know a word is good when the spellchecker redlines it). Smiles persisted with his dream project – a biography of the father of railroads George Stephenson. Smiles persevered with the book despite discouragement from Stephenson’s son, and day jobs sapping his writing time. The George Stephenson project began for Smiles in 1849. It was finally published in 1857.

Failure and rejection be damned. A side hustle is for life — and the sheer hell of it. He was a walking writer. And he began to benefit from his accumulated experiences. One trait of late bloomers is their ability to turn their experiences, however incoherent, however seemingly irrelevant, to their advantage as they persist in their interests.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part II, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader

Samuel Smiles’ determined path reminds me of Brooklyn Nets guard Seth Curry, who went undrafted and didn’t sign his first guaranteed contract until age twenty five. And the “exceptional case” Athletic Bilbao striker Aritz Aduriz. An athletic polymath who found success at the top level of Spanish football during the latter stages of his career. Scoring 66% percent of his career first division goals after age thirty and then retiring at thirty nine.

Read Henry Oliver’s full profiles on Samuel Smiles here: pt.1, pt.2.

And do subscribe to The Common Reader. It’s one of the brightest lights on the internet.
Coach Morgan Wooten’s Summer Basketball Workout Sheet (an excerpt)

December 14th, 2020
Source: Where’d You Get Those? New York City’s Sneaker Culture: 1960-1987

By: Bobbito Garcia

We’ve spoken about practice here before.

I love how Bobbito not only kept his off season workout sheet (written by coaching legend Morgan Wooten) into adulthood, but also published it in his book – Where’d You’d Get Those?

Coach Wooten’s off-season workout regimen is a reminder of the importance of practice. Remove the word “basketball” if needed and replace it with painting, forklifting, clarineting, YouTubing…

Whatever skill or hobby you’re wanting to improve at, creating a specific practice routine will help accelerate your progress.

Basketball is a game in which you either get better or you get worse. It has become so highly competitive that in order to perform to the best of your ability at all times, you must work to improve constantly. The summer is the time when a player can work on individual fundamentals that make him a better player.
Coach Morgan Wooten
1. BALL HANDLING (15 minutes) A. Pound the ball both hands B. Finger tip drills C. Pass ball around your mid section D. Single leg circle - both legs E. Around legs and body both ways F. Figure 8 both ways G. Figure 8 and drop both ways H. Crab run both ways I. Side catch J. Front catch K. Spin ball on finger
Pick-up Basketball

April 16th, 2020

They were gigantic.

Skilled. But I kept showing up,

hoping to be picked.
I’m not Lebron James

February 6th, 2020

I’m not Lebron James

No lobbed dunks, or pull up j’s

Still, I hoop. I must.
Knicks Love

January 30th, 2020

The Knicks were my first.

Before Shaq. Before Penny.

Madison Square love.
Street football spawns legends. Arnold Muhren is proof.

September 5th, 2019

The Muhrens – like all the Dutch greats of their era – learned their football in the streets. Arnold: ‘My brother played with his friends, and when I was five or six I started joining in. I started off in goal but I could never stay there; I was always running all over the place and eventually they said I could play with them. We weren’t exceptional. Everybody could play football at a very high level. At the time there was little else to do but play football. If you couldn’t play football, bad luck: you had to go in goal. We played everyday. If it was raining, we played in the bedroom. At school we played football between lessons. When school finished, we played on the street again; there was no traffic. We played with anything as long as it was round – rolled-up papers tied with string, anything. Some people’s parents had money and could get hold of a proper ball, but mostly it was tennis balls. You develop great technique like that. The ground was so hard, so you didn’t want to fall because it hurt; so you have good balance. And the game was very quick because the hard ground makes the game quicker. No one ever told us how to play. It was all natural.
Arnold Muhren as quoted in David Winners book: Brilliant Orange.

The streets made us…

The street football environment Muhren describes, reminds me of the pick-up basketball games of my childhood.

We’d play all day long in the summers, adapting the standard game of full court 5 on 5, into various micro-games.

If there was three of us, we’d play 21. An every man/woman for themselves, winner takes all mini tournament. The goal being to score 21 points, without going over, through a combination of three pointers, two pointers and free throws.

It’s basketball blackjack.

If there was only two of us we’d play HORSE.

HORSE is a shot matching game. The first player calls his shot and the opponent has to match it exactly – off the backboard, nothing but net, left hand only, etc.

If your opponent misses the shot you call, they receive a letter. The first player to receive enough letters to spell out HORSE is the loser.

And if we got bored of all of that…we’d lower the hoop to 6 feet and have a dunk contest.

Not sure it made us better players, but it was fun as hell.
1,000 Jump Shots

August 27th, 2019

Knees bent. Shoulders squared.

Gooseneck up. Snap your wrist. Fly.

Chasing perfection.