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HOW DAVID BEATS GOLIATH. Gladwell, Malcolm

New Yorker

. 5/11/2009, Vol. 85 Issue 13, p40-49. 10p. 1 Color

Photograph.

Article *

BASKETBALL coaching

*COACHING (Athletics)

*BASKETBALL coaches

*BASKETBALL instruction

611620

Sports and Recreation Instruction

RANADIVE, Vivek

The article profiles Vivek Ranadive, a National Jun ior Basketball coach who challenged traditional

basketball coaching strategies. Ranadive decided to have his team play a full-court press and contest

their opponent's attempts to advance the ball up th e court to minimize the gap between good teams

and weak teams. The author compares Ranadive's achi evements to other unlikely victories.

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HOW DAVID BEATS GOLIATH

Section:

ANNALS OF INNOVATION

When underdogs break the rules

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter A njali's basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was

that he would never raise his voice. This was Natio nal Junior Basketball -- the Little League of basketball. The team was

made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year -olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He

would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm.

He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and

common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé w as puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from

Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He woul d never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it

was mindless. Team A would score and then immediate ly retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the

Listen

American Accent 

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8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... ball and dribble it into Team A's end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A

basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But mos t of the time a team defended only about twenty-fou r feet of that,

conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, tea ms would play a full-court press -- that is, they would contest their

opponent's attempt to advance the ball up the court . But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there

were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world a bout the way the game ought to be played, and Ranad ivé thought that

that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, afte r all, had

players who were tall and could dribble and shoot w ell; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their

opponent's end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that

made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika,

and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren't all that tall. They couldn't shoot. They

weren't particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playgro und every evening.

Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, "little blond girls" from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley.

These were the daughters of computer programmers an d people with graduate degrees. They worked on science

projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up t o be marine

biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the c onventional way -- if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court

without opposition -- they would almost certainly l ose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to

America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing eas ily. His second

principle, then, was that his team would play a rea l full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the

national championships. "It was really random," Anj ali Ranadivé said. "I mean, my father had never pla yed basketball

before."

David's victory over Goliath, in the Biblical accou nt, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids wi n all the time. The

political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently loo ked at every war fought in the past two hundred yea rs between strong and

weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71. 5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was

analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful -- in terms of armed might an d population -- as its

opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the u nderdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David i nitially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet a nd girded himself with a

sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. "I cannot walk in these,

for I am unused to it," he said (in Robert Alter's translation), and picked up those five smooth stone s. What happened,

Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconvent ional

strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David's winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6.

When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rule s, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, "even when everything we think

we know about power says they shouldn't. "

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is bette r known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army

occupying Arabia near the end of the First World Wa r. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial

focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long rai lroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down

through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a l arge force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to

gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison t here, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedo uin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never

succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway ? The Turks sat in Medina "on the defensive, immobi le." There were

so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel an d water, that they could hardly make a major move across the

desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their poi nt of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to atta ck them where they

were weak -- along the vast, largely unguarded leng th of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of

focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage w ar over the broadest territory possible.

The Bedouins under Lawrence's command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir

Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them "an untrained rabble, most of whom have

never fired a rifle." But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a

hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as

much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the de sert, even in summer. "Our cards were speed and time, not hitting

power," Lawrence wrote. "Our largest available reso urces were the tribesmen, men quite unused to forma l warfare, whose

assets were movement, endurance, individual intelli gence, knowledge of the country, courage." The eigh teenth-century

general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence's tro ops were all legs.

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8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th,

sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-N aam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at

Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garris on and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged

the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited ele ven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of

Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twic e on April 6th.

Lawrence's masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from Br itish ships

patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the w est. Lawrence decided to attack from the east inste ad, coming at the city

from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop -- u p from the Hejaz,

north into the Syrian desert, and then back down to ward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most

inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead

the Turks about his intentions. "This year the vall ey seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adde rs, cobras and

black snakes," Lawrence writes in "The Seven Pillar s of Wisdom" of one stage in the journey:

We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were

snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in k nots around their

brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into th e alert ring of our

debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died o f bites; four

recovered after great fear and pain, and a swel ling of the poisoned

limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the par t with snake-skin

plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the s ufferer until he

died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence's band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks,

and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not thi nk that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the

desert. This was Lawrence's great insight. David ca n beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability -- and substituting effort

for ability turns out to be a winning formula for u nderdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the

basketball court.

Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine- boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous wal k. His father

was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he say s, because he wouldn't stop challenging the safety of India's planes.

Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documenta ry on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was

in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for un dergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the

release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped ou tside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he

got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.

In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Sil icon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as "real

time" processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he's "batch

processing." There is a gap between the events in t he company -- sales -- and his understanding of tho se events. Wall

Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of

databases. The trader would collect information fro m here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What

Ranadivé's company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate t hose databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all

the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processin g was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBC O 's software

powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of

degree. "We've been working with some airlines," he said. "You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn't,

they actually know right away that it's not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is tha t they don't have all their

information in one place. There are passenger syste ms that know where the passenger is. There are airc raft and

maintenance systems that track where the plane is a nd what kind of shape it's in. Then, there are baggage systems and

ticketing systems -- and they're all separate. So y ou land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it d oesn't show up."

Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranad ivé maintains, happens because of the lag between t he event (the

luggage doesn't make it onto the plane) and the res ponse (the airline tells you that your luggage didn't make the plane).

The lag is why you're angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to

fly that airline again. Put all the databases toget her, and there's no lag. "What we can do is send yo u a text message the

moment we know your bag didn't make it," Ranadivé s aid, "telling you we'll ship it to your house."

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8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time

-- not once every month or two. "Everything in the world is now real time," he said. "So when a certain type of shoe isn't

selling at your corner shop, it's not six months be fore the guy in China finds out. It's almost instantaneous, thanks to my

software. The world runs in real time, but governme nt runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep

the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government's way in your house, then

every few months you'd turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house." Rana divé argued that

we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through

those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money

supply. "It can all be automated," he said. "Look, we've had only one soft landing since the Second Wo rld War. Basically,

we've got it wrong every single time."

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are

powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a S olomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks be tween economic

adjustments seems central to the process of deliber ation. To Ranadivé, though, "deliberation" just prettifies the difficulties

created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because i t's several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and

scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five m inutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you

stepped off the plane.

Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way ba sketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball

game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth,

back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-seco nd increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities.

The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four f eet from the opposing

team's basket. He called out a play that the team h ad choreographed a hundred times in practice. It wa s only then that the

defending team sprang into action, actively contest ing each pass and shot. Actual basketball took up o nly half of that

twenty-second interval, so that a game's real lengt h was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four

minutes -- and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. I t was as formal and as

convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille . The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to

run back to their own end, in order to compose them selves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to

compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to

perfection. Basketball was batch!

Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day,

because he knew that the more he accelerated the pa ce of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance -- and

endurance battles favor the insurgent. "And it happ ened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near D avid that David

hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Phil istine," the Bible says. "And he reached his hand into the pouch and

took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead." The second sentence -- the slingshot part --

is what made David famous. But the first sentence m atters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He

speeded it up. "The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better

target," the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes i n "The Life of David." Pinsky calls David a "point guard ready to flick the

basketball here or there." David pressed. That's wh at Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

Ranadivé's basketball team played in the National J unior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representing

Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye's Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had ne ver played

basketball, he recruited a series of experts to hel p him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pr o running back for the

San Francisco 49ers, who is also TIBCO 's director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary

for the off-season hill workouts he put himself thr ough. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf

courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig si gned on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who pla yed Division I

basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent's best player in

order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. "S he has always been like my big sister," Anjali Ranadivé said. "It was

so awesome to have her along."

Redwood City's strategy was built around the two de adlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the

ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and

has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the co urt. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually,

that's not an issue, because teams don't contest th e inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Re dwood City did

not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her cou nterpart. When some teams play the press, the defen der plays

behind the offensive player she's guarding, to impe de her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast,

played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn't guard

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8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second

defender against the other team's best player. "Thi nk about football," Ranadivé said. "The quarterback can run with the

ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it's still damned difficult to complete a pass." Basketb all was harder. A smaller

court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ba ll. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was pla ying against simply

couldn't make the inbounds pass within the five-sec ond limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her

five seconds were about to be up, would throw the b all away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood

City players. Ranadivé's girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent's end, within ten seconds,

and if Redwood City's opponents met the first deadl ine the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would

descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass an d "trap" her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She'd sprint over and

double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she'd steal the ball. Maybe th e other player

would throw it away in a panic -- or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. "When we

first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything," Anjali said. "So my dad said the whole game long, 'Your

job is to guard someone and make sure they never ge t the ball on inbounds plays.' It's the best feeling in the world to steal

the ball from someone. We would press and steal, an d do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There

were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them."

The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got

the ball underneath their opponent's basket, they r arely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill

and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few g ames that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team's players

showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.

"What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses," Rometra Craig said. She helped ou t once Redwood

City advanced to the regional championships. "We co uld hide the fact that we didn't have good outside shooters. We

could hide the fact that we didn't have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defen se we were getting

steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with t he girls. I told them, 'We're not the best basketball team out there.' But

they understood their roles." A twelve-year-old gir l would go to war for Rometra. "They were awesome," she said.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak -- the railroad -- and not where they were strong, Medina. Redwood

City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a gam e where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one . Lawrence

extended the battlefield over as large an area as p ossible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They def ended all ninety-four

feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It su pplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those "quite unused to formal

warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, ind ividual intelligence . . . courage."

"It's an exhausting strategy," Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a TIBCO conference room, remi niscing about

their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was

sitting at the table.

"My girls had to be more fit than the others," Rana divé said.

"He used to make them run," Craig said, nodding app rovingly.

"We followed soccer strategy in practice," Ranadivé said. "I would make them run and run and run. I co uldn't teach them

skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the

game. That's why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you're going to get tired." He turned to Craig. "What was

our cheer again?"

The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, "One, two, three, ATTITUDE!"

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

"One time, some new girls joined the team," Ranadiv é said, "and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, 'Look, this

is what we're going to do,' and I showed them. I sa id, 'It's all about attitude.' And there was this one new girl on the team,

and I was worried that she wouldn't get the whole a ttitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, 'No, no, it's not One,

two three, ATTITUDE. It's One, two, three, attitude HAH ' " -- at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams pla yed a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts

Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary a rena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn't lost since

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8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen's star was none other than Julius Erving -- Dr. J. The UMass

team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center

had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting

forward -- and forwards are typically almost as tal l as centers -- was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the

opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press , and never let up. "We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it

was a war the rest of the way," Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. "These were tou gh city kids. We

played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack." Phelps sen t in one

indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx a fter another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and

Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn't matter. Fordham won, 87–79.

In the world of basketball, there is one story afte r another like this about legendary games where Dav id used the full-court

press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham

over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages p oint out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with

adept ball handlers and astute passers -- and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do

to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Play ing insurgent

basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath . If Fordham had

played UMass the conventional way, it would have lo st by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the

basketball establishment.

What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stu nning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same

way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humble d in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his

defeat and use the press himself the next time he h ad a team of underdogs? He did not.

The only person who seemed to have absorbed the les sons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass

freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn't play tha t day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now , thirty-eight

years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles,

Zambetti. "They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I'd ever seen," Pitino said. "Five guys between six feet

five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they cov ered ground. I studied it. There is no way they sho uld have beaten us.

Nobody beat us at the Cage."

Pitino became the head coach at Boston University i n 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to

take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament ap pearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coa ching stop,

Providence College, Pitino took over a team that ha d gone 11–20 the year before. The players were shor t and almost

entirely devoid of talent -- a carbon copy of the F ordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game aw ay from

playing for the national championship. At the Unive rsity of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to

the Final Four three times -- and won a national ch ampionship -- with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press

back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the

N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. Colle ge coaches of Pitino's calibre typically have had numerous players

who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the p rofessional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one,

Antoine Walker. It doesn't matter. Every year, he r acks up more and more victories.

"The greatest example of the press I've ever coache d was my Kentucky team in '96, when we played L.S.U .," Pitino said.

He was at the athletic building at the University o f Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he

watches tapes of opponents' games. "Do we have that tape?" Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close

to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentuck y stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.'s end. Immediately,

the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to t he basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again.

Another easy basket by Walker. "Walker had almost t hirty points at halftime," Pitino said. "He dunked it almost every time.

When we steal, he just runs to the basket." The Ken tucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed

around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was ma yhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the "rush state" in their opponents -- that moment when the player with

the ball is shaken out of his tempo -- and L.S.U. c ould not find a way to get out of the rush state. "See if you find one play

that L.S.U. managed to run," Pitino said. You could n't. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they

did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-c ourt, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they

were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. "We had eighty-six

points at halftime," Pitino went on -- eighty-six p oints being, of course, what college basketball tea ms typically score in an

entire game. "And I think we'd forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime," twenty-three turnovers being what college

basketball teams might force in two games. "I love watching this," Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. "Every

Page 6 of 9 HOW DAVID BEATS GOLIATH: EBSCOhost

8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... day, you dream about getting a team like this again." So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use

the full-court press the way Pitino does?

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time

underdogs didn't fight like David. Of the two hundr ed and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft's database, the underdog

chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventiona l way a hundred and fifty-two times -- and lost a hundred and nineteen

times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish st raight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight

up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the Briti sh straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion o f 1817, the Sri Lankans

fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, t he Burmese chose to fight the British straight up a nd lost. The list of

failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the Fren ch until, in 1951,

the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare -- and promptly suffered a series of defeats.

George Washington did the same in the American Revo lution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the

colonists so well in the conflict's early stages. " As quickly as he could," William Polk writes in "Vi olent Politics," a history of

unconventional warfare, Washington "devoted his ene rgies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a

result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war."

It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Ke ntucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence's long march acr oss the desert

to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife -and-drum corps than

it is to have them ride six hundred miles through t he desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose

yourself after every score than swarm about, arms f lailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is

the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort ca n trump ability -- legs, in Saxe's formulation, can overpower arms --

because relentless effort is in fact something rare r than the ability to engage in some finely tuned a ct of motor

coördination.

"I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press," Pitino said. Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids

trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. "Then they e- mail me. They tell me they can't do it. They don't know if they have the

bench. They don't know if the players can last." Pi tino shook his head. "We practice every day for two hours straight," he

went on. "The players are moving almost ninety-eigh t per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we

make our corrections" -- that is, when Pitino and h is coaches stop play to give instruction -- "they are seven-second

corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working." Seven seconds! The coaches wh o came to

Louisville sat in the stands and watched that cease less activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David's rules

was too daunting. They would rather lose.

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford Univers ity named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron

tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volume s of rules, well

beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets

then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. "Imagine this enormous auditorium are a with tables,

and at each table people are paired off," Lenat sai d. "The winners go on and advance. The losers get e liminated, and the

field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience ge ts larger and larger."

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence prog ram that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules

of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any a dvice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was

not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure thing s out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a

hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Euri sko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer.

Most teams fielded some version of a traditional na val fleet -- an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended

against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. "The program came up with a strategy of spending th e trillion on an

astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense an d no mobility,"

Lenat said. "They just sat there. Basically, if the y were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy

would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn't matter, because we had so many."

Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this t ime the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer j ust sit there. Now

one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet "agility." Eurisko went back to work. "What Eurisko did was say that if any

of our ships got damaged it would sink itself -- an d that would raise fleet agility back up again," Lenat said. Eurisko won

again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were peop le steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who

could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been

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8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had

no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences "Johnny robbed a

bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison," bu t Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was p erfectly literal; it

could not fill in the missing step -- "Johnny was c aught, tried, and convicted." Eurisko was an outsid er. But it was precisely

that outsiderness that led to Eurisko's victory: no t knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

"Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approxima tion of reality," Lenat

explained. "What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But

Eurisko didn't have that kind of preconception, par tly because it didn't know enough about the world." So it found solutions

that were, as Lenat freely admits, "socially horrif ying": send a thousand defenseless and immobile shi ps into battle; sink

your own ships the moment they get damaged.

This is the second half of the insurgent's creed. I nsurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they

will do what is "socially horrifying" -- they will challenge the conventions about how battles are sup posed to be fought. All

the things that distinguish the ideal basketball pl ayer are acts of skill and coördination. When the g ame becomes about

effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable -- a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limb s and usually

competent players panicking and throwing the ball o ut of bounds. You have to be outside the establishm ent -- a foreigner

new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at th e end of the bench -- to have the audacity to play it that way. George

Washington couldn't do it. His dream, before the wa r, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and

brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had serv ed the American Revolution so well to be "an exceed ing dirty and

nasty people." He couldn't fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.

T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors

from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went

to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been ri ding one all his life.

And David, let's not forget, was a shepherd. He cam e at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of

his trade. He didn't know that duels with Philistin es were supposed to proceed formally, with the cros sing of swords.

"When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down

and rescue it from his clutches," David explained t o Saul. He brought a shepherd's rules to the battle field.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedl ess of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the

Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit t he admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they wer e the

establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scr ambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have

seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. "Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of

their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition," the dean of Columbia College said o f the insurgents

from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn't being complimentary. Goliath does not sim ply dwarf David.

He brings the full force of social convention again st him; he has contempt for David.

"In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet," Lenat said. "It was really embarrassing. People fel t sorry for us. But

somewhere around the third round they stopped laugh ing, and some time around the fourth round they started

complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said

that it was not really in the spirit of the tournam ent to have these weird computer-designed fleets wi nning. They said that if

we entered again they would stop having the tournam ent. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out."

It isn't surprising that the tournament directors f ound Eurisko's strategies beyond the pale. It's wro ng to sink your own

ships, they believed. And they were right. But let' s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let's r emember why

Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath's terms, Goliath wins.

The trouble for Redwood City started early in the r egular season. The opposing coaches began to get an gry. There was a

sense that Redwood City wasn't playing fair -- that it wasn't right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls,

who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of t he game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to

learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as ea sily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned

something much more valuable -- that effort can tru mp ability and that conventions are made to be chal lenged. But the

coaches on the other side of Redwood City's lopside d scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.

"There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot," Ranadivé said. "He was this big guy. He

obviously played football and basketball himself, a nd he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at h is own game. He

wanted to beat me up."

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8/15/ 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.library.capella.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vi d=0&sid=f243adab -45 ... Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. "The other coaches would be screaming at their girls,

humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs -- 'That's a foul! That's a foul!' But we weren't fouling. We

were just playing aggressive defense."

"My girls were all blond-haired white girls," Ranad ivé said. "My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because

she's half-Indian. One time, we were playing this a ll-black team from East San Jose. They had been pla ying for years.

These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were ju st crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We

wouldn't even let them inbound the ball, and the co ach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming

at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get." Ranadivé shook his head:

never, ever raise your voice. "Finally, the ref phy sically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn't stand

it because here were all these blond-haired girls w ho were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them."

At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from

somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had t o play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their

own referee as well. The game was at eight o'clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat

the traffic. It was downhill from there. The refere e did not believe in "One, two, three, attitude HAH ." He didn't think that

playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. H e began calling one foul after another.

"They were touch fouls," Craig said. Ticky-tacky st uff. The memory was painful.

"My girls didn't understand," Ranadivé said. "The r ef called something like four times as many fouls o n us as on the other

team."

"People were booing," Craig said. "It was bad."

"A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?" Ranadivé shook his head.

"One girl fouled out."

"We didn't get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . ."

Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwo od City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as

their opponents advanced down the court. They did n ot run. They paused and deliberated between each po ssession.

They played basketball the way basketball is suppos ed to be played, and they lost -- but not before making Goliath

wonder whether he was a giant, after all.

PHOTO (COLOR): A non-stop full-court press gives we ak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why

have so few adopted it?

~~~~~~~~

By Malcolm Gladwell

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