June 29, 2016 • 35 mins
Wilt Chamberlain’s brilliant career was marred by one, deeply inexplicable decision: He chose a shooting technique that made him one of the worst foul shooters in basketball—even though he had tried a better alternative. Why do smart people do dumb things?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The greatest game of basketball anyone has ever played
was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, March second, nineteen sixty two. That's
the big fourth quarter, and everybody's thinking about he's got
sixty nine gone at here's the cold, rainy night. Just
(00:36):
over four thousand people in the stands. Philadelphia Warriors versus
the New York Knicks one cherion hours and have a
good shot. They're taking it, but mostly they're setting up
the big man. The star of the Warriors was a
man named Wilt Chamberlain. No doubt you've heard of him,
seven foot one, two hundred and seventy five pounds. For
sheer physical presence, there has probably never been anyone like wild.
(01:00):
There are lots of seven footers who play basketball who
are basically on the court purely because they're seven feet tall.
They're clumsy and ungainly. Chamberlain was not like that. He
was as big as an oak tree and as graceful
as a ballet dancer. That season nineteen sixty one to
nineteen sixty two, he ended up averaging more than fifty
points a game. That record will never be broken. So
(01:28):
March second, Wilt was hungover, heaping out all night with
a woman he picked up at a bar. That's classic
Will too. He would later claim to have slept with
twenty thousand women in his life. And when he said that,
lots of people did the math and said there was
no way that was possible, given the fact that there
were only twenty four hours in a day and Will
only lived to the age of sixty three. But even
(01:49):
the skeptics were like, well, maybe it's ten thousand or
eight thousand. It was an argument over whether it was
an unbelievably high number or merely an incredibly high number.
The big Man over the Warriors and the big Man
of the ninety two points Jars. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
(02:15):
You're listening to Revisionist History, where every week we re
examine the forgotten and the misunderstood. This week's episode is
about Wilt Chamberlain's most famous game. Wolf got the ball,
he's got up, he shoots, So back to the game
(02:40):
in question. Chamberlain makes his first five shots and has
twenty three points at the end of the first quarter.
At halftime he has forty one points. No one's thinking
history just yet, but then by the end of the
third quarter he has sixty nine points and he keeps
going and going and going. Bill so Lui a hundred points,
(03:11):
the most anyone has ever scored in a professional basketball game.
And here's the most incredible thing about it. He shot
brilliantly from the foul line. That's Rick Berry speaking. He
was a contemporary of Chamberlain's, also a Hall of Famer,
an absolutely unstoppable scorer. I met him at his condo
(03:35):
in South Carolina where he lives part of the year,
so we can follow his son, Canyon, who plays basketball
for the College of Charleston. Barry is seventy two, six
foot eight inches tall, barrel chest, legs that look like
he had special extensions put on them, and that thing
that great athletes have and never seemed to lose, which
is that they kind of glide across the floor like
(03:56):
they have wheels on. A big part of this episode
is about Barry, but other people too, because although this
sounds like it's going to be a show about basketball,
the truth is it's not. It's a show about good
eye he is and why they have such difficulties spreading.
But for the moment, back to Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain, He's
(04:19):
made twenty eight out of his thirty two shots from
the free throw line, eighty seven point five percent. The
reason that's incredible is that when Chamberlain came into the NBA,
he was a horrendous free throw shooter. Though worst. Here
was a man who could excel at virtually every physical
feat under the sun, who could score at will with
(04:41):
two and sometimes three defenders draped all over his body,
but put him all alone fifteen feet from the basket,
and he was hopeless. He was shooting forty percent from
the free throw line. That's terrible. But this season Chamberlain
changes tactics. He starts to shoot his foul shots underhanded.
(05:02):
He doesn't release the ball up by his forehead. He
holds the ball between his knees and flicks it towards
the basket from a slight crouch, and all of a sudden,
he's a pretty good free throw shooter. He gets up
to more than sixty percent, and that special night in Hershey, Pennsylvania,
he's an incredible free throw shooter. He makes twenty eight
(05:28):
free throws, the most anyone has ever made in NBA history.
What Rick Barry will tell you is that shooting underhanded
is simply a better way to make foul shots. And
he knows that because he was one of the greatest
foul shooters of all time, maybe the greatest. I miss
nine ten in one season, and nine and another and
(05:49):
the whole season. To put that in perspective, Lebron James,
the greatest player of the current basketball generation, typically misses
about one hundred and fifty free throws a season. Rick
Berry would miss nine or ten. I think I shot
ninety three five or something in ninety four seven, something
like that, and Rick Berry only shot underhanded. From a
physics standpoint, it's a much better way to shoot. Less
(06:12):
things that can go wrong, less things that you have
to worry about repeating properly in order for it to
be successful. But the other thing is is that who
walks around like this, Yeah, their hands and this is
not a natural position. Yeah, when I shoot underhanded free throws,
where are my arms hanging straight down the way they
are normally? And so I'm totally completely relaxed. It's not
(06:33):
in the situation where I have to worry about my
muscles getting tenser tight and then the shot itself. It's
a much softer shot. So many in my shots even
if they're a little off they hit so nice and soft,
and they'll still fall in the basket much softer touch, yea,
And so you have a little bit more margin for error.
Some of those shots that are a little bit offline
have a much better opportunity of going into the basket.
(06:55):
Then when you shoot overhand, so Will Chamberlain switches to
a better shooting technique. It pays off. In the greatest
basketball game ever played, He's playing the way that Rick
Berry proved basketball players ought to play. Then something incredible happens.
Wilt Chamberlain stops shooting underhanded, and he goes back to
(07:16):
being a terrible foul shooter. Let's think about what he
did for a moment. Chamberlain had a problem, he tested
out a possible solution, the solution worked, and all of
a sudden, he's fixed his biggest weakness as a player.
(07:39):
This is not a trivial matter. If you're a basketball
player and you can't hitch your free throws, you're an
incredible liability to your team, particularly at the end of
close games. The other side simply fouls you every time
you touch the ball because they know you'll miss your
free throw and they'll get the ball back. If you
can't hitch your foul shots, it means you can't be
used in a tight game. You know what Chamberlain's coach
(08:02):
said to him, if you were a ninety percent shooter,
we might never lose. You got to know him quite well.
I got to know him. You don't, right, I just
joked with him, said your technique was terrible. I mean,
but I mean, had you stuck with it, I mean,
there's no telling what he would have done. I mean,
the numbers he would have put up would have been
insane because the only way they defended him was to foul.
(08:24):
Chamberlain had every incentive in the world to keep shooting
free throws underhanded, and he didn't. I think we understand
cases where people don't do what they ought to do
because of ignorance. This is not that this is doing
something dumb, even though you are fully aware that you're
doing something dumb. By the way, there have been countless
(08:46):
players like Chamberlain, players who could have been transcendent, devastating
if only they had been opened to taking foulol shots
a different way. Take Shaquille O'Neal up there with Will
Chamberlain is one of the greatest NBA centers of all time,
but an absolutely horrendous free throw shooter. Barry tried to
reason with him once, Oh, you actually talk to you.
(09:09):
I tried to get Shack to change. When I tried
to get him do it, he said, I forget. I'd
rather shoot zero than shoot underhanded. I'm just fascinated by that.
I don't understand it. Yeah. No, the difference is, if
Shack was an eighty percent free throw shooter, he becomes
the go to guy on the court as opposed to
go to the bench guy. You change the dynamic of
(09:30):
the game. No one shoots underhanded. Not even Barry's teammates
followed his lead, people who saw him shoot that way
every day and never miss one guy. Only George Johnson,
my teammate with the Warriors, he was I think he
was like forty eight fifty percent of something like that,
and I worked with him for one season. I didn't
get to stay with him. He didn't get the technique
down just as much as I'd like it. But I
(09:50):
think eventually, a season or two later, I think George
actually shot eighty percent. I can actually look it up.
Would be interesting to see what he did. I'll get
George Johnson's stats here anything George Johnson's stats. Okay, stats
for George Johnson NBA are George Johnson stands from the
(10:10):
twenty fifteen nf thou season, NFL wrong guy, wrong season.
Let me get anyway, we'll look it up. It's it's interesting,
I think. But what about on your on your high
school team, did anyone follow you? Oh? No, nobody. I've
only had one guy ever come to me. An NBA
guy came to me. I'm will tell you his name,
but he came to me. He asked me to work
with him. I did it. I worked with him. I
(10:31):
had him shooting really well, and he never had the
nerve to go back and do it. When he tell
his name, I don't want it's fair to him. I
don't want to say his name. It's not fair to him,
like it's some kind of dark, shameful secret. College basketball
is no different. Out of the thousands of college basketball
players today, there are just two who shoot underhanded. One
(10:55):
is a Nigerian American who plays for Louisville called chinanu Onuaku.
The other is Kenyon Berry, who plays for the College
of Charleston and who in case he missed this earlier,
happens to be Rick Barry's son. In other words, there
are only two conditions under which people will try the
underhanded free throw, one if their family is from another continent,
(11:15):
and two if they're an offspring of Rick Barry. Anyway,
do you want to just quickly describe where we are
and what we're doing. That's my producer, Jacob Smith. He
hung out with some players on the Columbia University women's
basketball team and tried to get them to shoot underhanded.
Our theory was, maybe this is just a dumb man's thing.
(11:36):
Maybe women are more rational when they're on the court.
So we are in Columbia's basketball gym, and we are
going to compare overhand shooting to underhand shooting. Here. That's
Arra Talkov, a junior in the team. She missed her
first try. I feel like you could bend in the
knee a little more in that. Then she makes the
(11:59):
next two shots, her first two ever shooting underhanded. But
Jacob couldn't get any of the Columbia players interested in
switching over. Here's Sarah Meade, senior point guard. Ever since
we were young, we were taught to shoot it overhand,
and you know, as kids you kind of play around
with the idea of a granny shot or underhand, but yeah,
I'm not sure we've ever taken it seriously. She calls
(12:22):
it a granny shot, a shot used by one of
the greatest players ever to play the game. Women are
as bad as men. We like to think that good
ideas will spread because they're good, because their advantages are obvious.
But that's not true. So why don't they Or to
put it another way, what is it about Rick Barry
(12:42):
that allowed him to shoot this way? And what is
it about Wilt Chamberlain and all the others that stands
in their way? Let me try out a theory on you.
It's from a sociologist named Mark Grnovator. Grnovator is one
of the greatest social theorists of his generation. If you're
an academic groupie like I am, Granovator is like James Dean.
(13:05):
So Grannovator came up with something called the threshold model
of collective behavior. He was trying to answer the question
of why people do things out of character. Use riots
as his big example. Why do otherwise law abouting citizens
suddenly throw rocks through windows before Granovadda came along. Sociologists
(13:26):
tried to explain that kind of puzzling behavior in terms
of beliefs. So the thinking went, you and I have
a set of beliefs, but when you throw the rock
through the window, something powerful must have happened in the
moment to change your beliefs. Something about the crowd transforms
the way you think. Here's Granovetta explaining that idea. There
(13:50):
was a lot of intellectual tradition that said that when
people got into a crowd, their independent judgment went out
the window, and they somehow became creatures of the crowd,
and that there was some kind of measthma of irrationality
would settle over people and they would act in ways
that they would never act if they were by themselves
or they weren't influenced by the mob mentality. But Grana
(14:12):
Better doesn't buy it. He doesn't think that being part
of the mob casts some kind of spell that makes
everyone irrational. To his mind, it's much more subtle and
complicated than that. People are pretty much who they are.
But if the situation develops in a certain way, then
there's a domino effect. Some people are activated, and that
activates other people. That activates other people, and it all
(14:34):
happen so fast. Grana Better says that the issue isn't
about people having beliefs about what's right and then suddenly
losing those beliefs because they're in a mob. The issue
is about thresholds. Now, what does Granovetter mean by that
word threshold? A belief is an internal thing. It's a
(14:55):
position we've taken in our head or in our heart.
But unlike beliefs, thresholds are external. They're about pure pressure.
Your threshold is the number of people who have to
do something before you join in. Grenovador makes two crucial arguments.
The first is at thresholds and beliefs sometimes overlap, but
a lot of the time they don't. When your teenage
(15:18):
son is driving a hundred miles an hour at midnight
with three of his friends, it's not because he believes
that driving one hundred miles an hour is a good idea.
In that moment, his beliefs are irrelevant. His behavior is
guided by his threshold. An eighteen year old may be
drunk at midnight in a car with three of his friends.
That person has a really low threshold. It doesn't take
(15:41):
a lot of encouragement to get him to do something stupid.
Grenovador's second point is just as important. Everyone's threshold is different.
There are plenty of radicals and troublemakers who might need
only slight encouragement to throw that rock. Their threshold is
really low. But think about your grandmother. She might well
(16:02):
need her sister, her grandchildren, her neighbors, her friends from church,
all of them to be throwing rocks before or she
would even dream of joining in. She's got a high threshold.
The riot has to be going on for a very
long time and has to involve a whole lot of
people before Grandma will join in. Grannovator's argument goes on
(16:23):
in much more detail, all of it fascinating, and I
encourage you, if you're interested, to look it up online
and read it, because it's beautifully clear. But for the moment,
I just want to focus on the one big implication
of Granovator's argument. What people believe isn't going to help
you much. If you want to understand why they try
or don't try difficult or problematic or strange things, you
(16:48):
have to understand the social context in which they're operating.
Your grandmother's belief is that rioting is wrong, but there
are times when even grandmother's might throw rocks through windows.
Granovador's theory explained a lot of things that have been
puzzling to me. So here's a good example. It's from
an interview I did at the ninety second Street in
(17:09):
New York with the economist Richard Taylor, who's one of
the leading lights in what's called behavioral economics. He had
a book coming out called Misbehaving, and I really liked it,
and we thought it would be fun if we did
an event together. You and I have met before, the
first timing that was at a hotel bar in Rochester, yes,
(17:29):
the only time I've ever Taylor's a kind of guy
who's interested in everything, including sports, and there was a
point in our conversation when he started to talk about
the fact that the owners of professional football teams do
things on occasion that are really stupid and inexplicable. Take
the professional football draft. For those of you who are
(17:51):
not football fans, let me explain. Every year, all the
draft eligible college football players are thrown into a big pool,
and the thirty two professional football teams picked the players
they want one by one. The first player taken is
the one that people think will be the best professional
player that person, it's the biggest salary. The second player
(18:11):
taken is the one predicted to be the second best
professional player, and so on. And after every team has
picked one player each, they all start again and do
another round. Because the players selected in the first round
are considered the most valuable, all the teams fight over them.
They pay enormous sums of money and construct elaborate deals
(18:32):
to try and acquire those high draft picks. The interesting
thing about that is there's a market for picks, so
you can trade the first pick for say half a
dozen second round picks. That's what the market says. Now,
that implies that the first pick is five times more
(18:54):
valuable than an early pick in the second round. Filer
in a colleague named Kade Massey decide to analyze this assumption.
Was it really true that a first round pick was
worth half a dozen second round picks? If you compute
the surplus a player provides to his team, meaning how
good his performance is minus how much you have to
(19:18):
pay him. What we found is these second round picks
are actually more valuable than that first pick. But you
could get five of those for that pick. It's the
biggest anomaly I've ever found. The implication of Taylor in
Massey's work is the teams should trade away their first
round picks. They should stockpile players in the second and
(19:40):
third rounds who can be paid a lot less and
are nearly as good. This is how you build a
winning football team. So what was the reaction of NFL
teams to Taylor's idea. Well, not long after he and
cade Massey did their research, they got a call from
the Washington Redskins. It was early in Dan Snyder's tenure
(20:01):
as owner, and I met him and he said, oh,
we don't want to know about this, and he introduced me.
I'm going to send my people to see you, and
they flew out to Chicago. I met with Kate and
me and we told them what our findings were. And
we basically have two pieces of advice, trade down and
(20:23):
lend picks this year from picks next year. With that
last sentence, Taylor is referring to the second thing he
and Massey discovered. Owners sometimes trade a pick in this
year's draft for a pick in some future draft. They
use a rule of thumb to figure out how to
value the difference between a player you can use this
year versus a draft pick you can't use until some
(20:45):
future year. And Taylor and Massey discover that the rule
of thumb makes no sense. It's completely irrational. It massively
overvalues current picks and undervalues future picks. Like a good economist,
Faylor talks about the value of that rule of thumb
as an interest rate. It's like borrowing money. If you
compute the real interest rate, it's one hundred and thirty
(21:08):
seven percent per year. In other words, for the privilege
of having a player now, as opposed to waiting a year,
the owners pay a huge premium. They borrow money at
one hundred and thirty seven percent interest. These guys did
not get to be billionaires borrowing at one hundred and
thirty seven percent per year. But that's the rule of
thumb they use. So anyway, we taught his guys Stands
(21:31):
guys what to do, and then we watched the draft
eagerly that year, and they trade it up and borrowed
picked this year for one next year. So okay. In
other words, the Redskins did the exact opposite of what
they should have done if they were rational, and they
weren't the only ones. Kayler and Massi have consulted for
(21:53):
three NFL franchises now and no one has ever followed
their advice. It gets worse. There's a very respected economist
named David Rohmer who famously proved that football teams would
win more games if they didn't punt, if they simply
use all four days to try and gain ten yards
as opposed to giving the ball away to their opponents.
(22:14):
So since Romer published his work, our NFL teams less
likely to punt on fourth down? You guessed it. No
to tell you how bigness is if you did this right,
but we think you would win one game a year
more if you also learned to go for it more
(22:37):
often on fourth down another game and a half. So
just being smart, we win at least two games a
year on average, two extra wins in a sixteen game season,
just by acting a little bit differently. Who wouldn't do that?
But nobody would? Now? Is that because they're stupid, because
(23:01):
they have irrational beliefs? That was my first thought when
I was listening to Theater talk about his football research,
Those dumb football owners. But that can't be right, You
don't get to their level by being dumb. Surely this
is about thresholds. Football owners and coaches are a small
group of people. They all know each other, They've all
(23:21):
done things a certain way for a long time, and
doing things that way has made them a lot of money.
They have a high threshold. These are a bunch of grandmothers.
The only way any of them is going to change
their behavior is if some radical goes first. And there
are no radical owners in the NFL. There's just Richard Taylor,
(23:42):
a geeky middle aged economists from the University of Chicago
with a bunch of equations that you need a PhD
to understand. There's some geek at every team who's read
our paper. You know. Think of the Jonah Hill character
in the movie Bunny Ball. Yeah, right, and nobody pays
attention to that guy. Apparently there aren't a lot of
(24:08):
radical in basketball either, just the Berries and Shinano on Nuwaku,
the Nigerian American who plays for Louisville, and as it
turns out, Mark Granovada. When I was a teenager, and
this would have been mostly in summer camp because I
never really played basketball outside of summer camp, but I
got to be very good at underhand free throwing. Oh really, yeah, yeah,
(24:33):
I could make almost every shot. I was wrong. There
are three conditions under which someone will try this shot.
One if you're an offspring of rick Berry, two if
your family is from another continent, and three if you're
a world famous sociologist. This, I think gets us a
little closer to the puzzle of Chamberlain. In his autobiography,
(24:57):
he has this throwaway comment on the subject of shooting underhanded.
Chamberlain wrote, I felt silly like a sissy shooting underhanded.
I know I was wrong. I know some of the
best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now,
the best one in the NBA, Rick Berry, shoots underhanded.
I just couldn't do it. Two key things here. First,
(25:21):
he writes, I know I was wrong, just as Grennovetter
would say. It's not Chamberlain's beliefs that are getting in
the way. He knows it's wrong. Then I felt silly
like a sissy. Remember the player for Columbia who describes
shooting underhanded as a granny shot. That's what Chamberlain's talking about.
(25:42):
He's the one to look foolish. He's a high threshold guy.
He needs everyone to be doing something new before he's
willing to join in. But Rick Berry he's different. Rick
Berry's dad comes to him when he's a junior in
high school and says, you really ought to shoot underhanded.
Rick's a pretty good free throw shooter at that point,
(26:02):
maybe seventy percent or so, but his dad tells him
he can do better. And your initial reaction is I
don't want to do it right because it seemed to
you like, well, I can't do it. Think I mean it,
swear the girl I said that. I always remember, and
I tell you, Dad, they're going to make fun of me.
That's the way the girls shoot. I can't do that,
said son. And I remember this so clearly, like it
was yesterday. Son. They can't make fun of you if
(26:26):
you're making them. And the first game I remember where
I did it was on the road in scotch Plains,
New Jersey. I shot the free throw guy and stands
yells out, hey, Barry a big sissy shooting like that,
and the guy next to him and I heard it
very clearly, he said, what are you making fun of
him for? He doesn't miss? So my dad's prophecy came true,
(26:49):
and I was cool from that point four, So I
didn't care anymore what they said. If I'm making him,
that's all that really matters. What's interesting is that Barry
actually has the same initial reaction as Will Chamberlain. I'm
going to look like a sissy. But he thinks about
it and he decides it doesn't bother him, or rather,
his drive to be a better shooter is stronger than
(27:09):
his worry about what others think of him. That's exactly
what it means to have a low threshold. The same
mindset that can lead someone to do something bad, like
a teenager driving drunk with very little encouragement, can also
lead to brave or innovative behavior. If you have a
threshold of zero, you're someone who doesn't need the support,
(27:30):
or the approval or the company of others to do
what you think is right. Now here's the catch. The
person who thinks this way is not always easy to
be around. Barry was never embraced by his fellow players.
There were a couple of notorious articles about him in
the nineteen eighties full of quotes like this from a
former teammate. If you'd got to know Rick, you'd realize
(27:52):
what a good guy he was. But around the league
they thought of him as the most arrogant guy. Ever.
Half the players disliked Rick, the other half hated him.
Here's another quote, he lacks diplomacy. If they sent him
to the u N, he'd end up starting World War three. Yeah. Well,
I was about winning. I was about giving my best effort,
(28:12):
and I had a very difficult time accepting the fact
that I wouldn't accept the fact if a teammate is
not going to play his hardest. Barry's been out of
the game for more than thirty years, but just talking
about basketball made him tense. There was a right way
to play the game, and when people didn't play it
the right way, it drove him crazy. Watch a game, right,
guy shoots free throw, misses it, everybody goes up, slaps
(28:34):
his hand. What where the hell did that come from?
I want to know who the guy is, the guy
that started doing that, and who was the genius that said, man,
that's a great idea. Let's go up and you know,
slap the guy's hand and let's go up to sturbest concentration.
When he's supposed to be focusing on shooting his free
throws and worry about having to slap the hands of
his teammates. Do you hear what upsets him The social
part of the game, players paying attention to each other's
(28:56):
feelings as opposed to their own performance, plus the fact
if he misses it, you should go up and smack
him in the head from missing the free throw, not
slap him on the hands and saying it's okay. Because
it's not okay. You just cost us a point. I mean,
I go nuts when I watch this kind of stuff
and nobody even talks about that, And it's something that
somebody brought up, somebody copied, and now everybody does it,
and it's stupid. I just have a real problem with that.
(29:19):
Barry wrote an autobiography in nineteen seventy two called Confessions
of a Basketball Gypsy, which I have to say is
one of the strangest autobiographies I've ever read. There are
sections of the book Barry gives over to various people
in his life. They each tried a few pages, and
he seems to care not one iota about what these
people say about him. So here is his mother comparing
(29:42):
Barry to his older brother Dennis Rick has become famous
and made a lot of money. But what is that?
I think maybe Dennis leads the better life. Or here's
his dad defending him. There was an incidant in Miami,
for example, that was blown out of proportion. I have
it on good authority that the player's jaw was broken
when he hit the floor, not from Rick's punch. And
(30:05):
this is his wife describing how they first met. He
awful to me. He was always shoving me in the pool,
and I hated him for it. Oh, I could take it,
but there's always someone who goes too far, who does
it more than the others, beyond endurance, and for me,
that was Rick. I would not let my parents and
my wife say these things about me in my own autobiography. Yeah,
(30:29):
I'd let people say what they wanted. I didn't ask
for editorial rights to be able to go through and
see what they said and see although I don't want
that in the air, I don't say what they wanted
to say. He doesn't care. The kind of person who
would let bad things be said about him in his
own autobiography is the kind of person who would shoot
a free throw that other people think looks ridiculous. I
(30:55):
spent an afternoon Mcbury at his conduct, and I'd read
all that stuff about him. Half the players disliked him,
the other half hated him. And I kind of braced
myself before I met him. But I liked him, Or
maybe it makes more sense to say that I really
admired him because I finally understood what someone like Rick
Barry stands for. It's perfectionism. And what is a perfectionist?
(31:20):
Someone who puts the responsibility of mastering the task at
hand ahead of all social considerations. Who would rather be
right than liked? And how can you be good at
something complex? How can you reach your potential if you
don't have a little bit of that inside you. I
(31:42):
know we've really only been talking about basketball, which is
just a game in the end, But the lesson here
is much bigger than that. It takes courage to be
good social courage to be honest with yourself, to do
things the right way. Berry made me lunch, a perfectly
delicious homemade vegetable soup with an avocado salad, simple, nutritious.
(32:07):
When we finished, he cleaned up meticulously. He needed a
ride into Charleston, so he got into my rental car.
He turned off the heating, which had been on high
because the weather had warmed up. He carefully took my
rental agreement and tucked it into the sun visor. And
then when there was a sudden slowing of the traffic ahead,
and I breaked a moment too late, I saw his
(32:28):
foot come down in the passenger footwell, as if he
were breaking from me, Only he breaked just a fraction
of a second before me. Because he's Rick Barry and
he does things better than everyone else. And all the
while he told stories from his basketball days, recalling shots
and scores and things people said as if it were yesterday.
(32:50):
I think he understands the price he's paid for being
the way he is. He kept coming up, everybody should
have me as a friend. I'm a good friend. I'm
a loyal friend. I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm
gonna be there if you need me. I mean, I'm
a good friend. I'm a good person. I was brought
up the right way. I'm a good person. Yet a
lot of people don't think he's not describing an easy life,
(33:12):
but think of what he gained. Rick Berry was the
best basketball player he could possibly have been, and Wilt
Chamberlain could never say that he's got it. He's trying
to get up. It's almost incomprehensible to me that someone
can have that attitude to sacrifice their success over worrying
(33:35):
about how somebody feels about you. Where it says about you.
That's that's sad. Really, you've been listening to Revisionist History.
Sometimes the past deserves a second chance. If you like
(34:09):
what you've heard, we'd love it. If you rate us
on iTunes, it helps a lot. You can find more
information about this and other episodes at Revisionist history dot
com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is
produced by Meilabal Roxand Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor
is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Guerra and
(34:32):
Taka Yazoo Zawa. Flawan Williams is our engineer. Fact checker
Michelle Seracca. Thanks to the Penalty Management team Laura Mayor,
Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, so I
(34:53):
used to joke with wealth and God rest his soul.
I got to know him well later in my life
and said, you should have come to me with the
un You had horrible technique you know what. I'm going
to help you, but
Pushkin. The greatest game of basketball anyone has ever played
was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, March second, nineteen sixty two. That's
the big fourth quarter, and everybody's thinking about he's got
sixty nine gone at here's the cold, rainy night. Just
(00:36):
over four thousand people in the stands. Philadelphia Warriors versus
the New York Knicks one cherion hours and have a
good shot. They're taking it, but mostly they're setting up
the big man. The star of the Warriors was a
man named Wilt Chamberlain. No doubt you've heard of him,
seven foot one, two hundred and seventy five pounds. For
sheer physical presence, there has probably never been anyone like wild.
(01:00):
There are lots of seven footers who play basketball who
are basically on the court purely because they're seven feet tall.
They're clumsy and ungainly. Chamberlain was not like that. He
was as big as an oak tree and as graceful
as a ballet dancer. That season nineteen sixty one to
nineteen sixty two, he ended up averaging more than fifty
points a game. That record will never be broken. So
(01:28):
March second, Wilt was hungover, heaping out all night with
a woman he picked up at a bar. That's classic
Will too. He would later claim to have slept with
twenty thousand women in his life. And when he said that,
lots of people did the math and said there was
no way that was possible, given the fact that there
were only twenty four hours in a day and Will
only lived to the age of sixty three. But even
(01:49):
the skeptics were like, well, maybe it's ten thousand or
eight thousand. It was an argument over whether it was
an unbelievably high number or merely an incredibly high number.
The big Man over the Warriors and the big Man
of the ninety two points Jars. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
(02:15):
You're listening to Revisionist History, where every week we re
examine the forgotten and the misunderstood. This week's episode is
about Wilt Chamberlain's most famous game. Wolf got the ball,
he's got up, he shoots, So back to the game
(02:40):
in question. Chamberlain makes his first five shots and has
twenty three points at the end of the first quarter.
At halftime he has forty one points. No one's thinking
history just yet, but then by the end of the
third quarter he has sixty nine points and he keeps
going and going and going. Bill so Lui a hundred points,
(03:11):
the most anyone has ever scored in a professional basketball game.
And here's the most incredible thing about it. He shot
brilliantly from the foul line. That's Rick Berry speaking. He
was a contemporary of Chamberlain's, also a Hall of Famer,
an absolutely unstoppable scorer. I met him at his condo
(03:35):
in South Carolina where he lives part of the year,
so we can follow his son, Canyon, who plays basketball
for the College of Charleston. Barry is seventy two, six
foot eight inches tall, barrel chest, legs that look like
he had special extensions put on them, and that thing
that great athletes have and never seemed to lose, which
is that they kind of glide across the floor like
(03:56):
they have wheels on. A big part of this episode
is about Barry, but other people too, because although this
sounds like it's going to be a show about basketball,
the truth is it's not. It's a show about good
eye he is and why they have such difficulties spreading.
But for the moment, back to Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain, He's
(04:19):
made twenty eight out of his thirty two shots from
the free throw line, eighty seven point five percent. The
reason that's incredible is that when Chamberlain came into the NBA,
he was a horrendous free throw shooter. Though worst. Here
was a man who could excel at virtually every physical
feat under the sun, who could score at will with
(04:41):
two and sometimes three defenders draped all over his body,
but put him all alone fifteen feet from the basket,
and he was hopeless. He was shooting forty percent from
the free throw line. That's terrible. But this season Chamberlain
changes tactics. He starts to shoot his foul shots underhanded.
(05:02):
He doesn't release the ball up by his forehead. He
holds the ball between his knees and flicks it towards
the basket from a slight crouch, and all of a sudden,
he's a pretty good free throw shooter. He gets up
to more than sixty percent, and that special night in Hershey, Pennsylvania,
he's an incredible free throw shooter. He makes twenty eight
(05:28):
free throws, the most anyone has ever made in NBA history.
What Rick Barry will tell you is that shooting underhanded
is simply a better way to make foul shots. And
he knows that because he was one of the greatest
foul shooters of all time, maybe the greatest. I miss
nine ten in one season, and nine and another and
(05:49):
the whole season. To put that in perspective, Lebron James,
the greatest player of the current basketball generation, typically misses
about one hundred and fifty free throws a season. Rick
Berry would miss nine or ten. I think I shot
ninety three five or something in ninety four seven, something
like that, and Rick Berry only shot underhanded. From a
physics standpoint, it's a much better way to shoot. Less
(06:12):
things that can go wrong, less things that you have
to worry about repeating properly in order for it to
be successful. But the other thing is is that who
walks around like this, Yeah, their hands and this is
not a natural position. Yeah, when I shoot underhanded free throws,
where are my arms hanging straight down the way they
are normally? And so I'm totally completely relaxed. It's not
(06:33):
in the situation where I have to worry about my
muscles getting tenser tight and then the shot itself. It's
a much softer shot. So many in my shots even
if they're a little off they hit so nice and soft,
and they'll still fall in the basket much softer touch, yea,
And so you have a little bit more margin for error.
Some of those shots that are a little bit offline
have a much better opportunity of going into the basket.
(06:55):
Then when you shoot overhand, so Will Chamberlain switches to
a better shooting technique. It pays off. In the greatest
basketball game ever played, He's playing the way that Rick
Berry proved basketball players ought to play. Then something incredible happens.
Wilt Chamberlain stops shooting underhanded, and he goes back to
(07:16):
being a terrible foul shooter. Let's think about what he
did for a moment. Chamberlain had a problem, he tested
out a possible solution, the solution worked, and all of
a sudden, he's fixed his biggest weakness as a player.
(07:39):
This is not a trivial matter. If you're a basketball
player and you can't hitch your free throws, you're an
incredible liability to your team, particularly at the end of
close games. The other side simply fouls you every time
you touch the ball because they know you'll miss your
free throw and they'll get the ball back. If you
can't hitch your foul shots, it means you can't be
used in a tight game. You know what Chamberlain's coach
(08:02):
said to him, if you were a ninety percent shooter,
we might never lose. You got to know him quite well.
I got to know him. You don't, right, I just
joked with him, said your technique was terrible. I mean,
but I mean, had you stuck with it, I mean,
there's no telling what he would have done. I mean,
the numbers he would have put up would have been
insane because the only way they defended him was to foul.
(08:24):
Chamberlain had every incentive in the world to keep shooting
free throws underhanded, and he didn't. I think we understand
cases where people don't do what they ought to do
because of ignorance. This is not that this is doing
something dumb, even though you are fully aware that you're
doing something dumb. By the way, there have been countless
(08:46):
players like Chamberlain, players who could have been transcendent, devastating
if only they had been opened to taking foulol shots
a different way. Take Shaquille O'Neal up there with Will
Chamberlain is one of the greatest NBA centers of all time,
but an absolutely horrendous free throw shooter. Barry tried to
reason with him once, Oh, you actually talk to you.
(09:09):
I tried to get Shack to change. When I tried
to get him do it, he said, I forget. I'd
rather shoot zero than shoot underhanded. I'm just fascinated by that.
I don't understand it. Yeah. No, the difference is, if
Shack was an eighty percent free throw shooter, he becomes
the go to guy on the court as opposed to
go to the bench guy. You change the dynamic of
(09:30):
the game. No one shoots underhanded. Not even Barry's teammates
followed his lead, people who saw him shoot that way
every day and never miss one guy. Only George Johnson,
my teammate with the Warriors, he was I think he
was like forty eight fifty percent of something like that,
and I worked with him for one season. I didn't
get to stay with him. He didn't get the technique
down just as much as I'd like it. But I
(09:50):
think eventually, a season or two later, I think George
actually shot eighty percent. I can actually look it up.
Would be interesting to see what he did. I'll get
George Johnson's stats here anything George Johnson's stats. Okay, stats
for George Johnson NBA are George Johnson stands from the
(10:10):
twenty fifteen nf thou season, NFL wrong guy, wrong season.
Let me get anyway, we'll look it up. It's it's interesting,
I think. But what about on your on your high
school team, did anyone follow you? Oh? No, nobody. I've
only had one guy ever come to me. An NBA
guy came to me. I'm will tell you his name,
but he came to me. He asked me to work
with him. I did it. I worked with him. I
(10:31):
had him shooting really well, and he never had the
nerve to go back and do it. When he tell
his name, I don't want it's fair to him. I
don't want to say his name. It's not fair to him,
like it's some kind of dark, shameful secret. College basketball
is no different. Out of the thousands of college basketball
players today, there are just two who shoot underhanded. One
(10:55):
is a Nigerian American who plays for Louisville called chinanu Onuaku.
The other is Kenyon Berry, who plays for the College
of Charleston and who in case he missed this earlier,
happens to be Rick Barry's son. In other words, there
are only two conditions under which people will try the
underhanded free throw, one if their family is from another continent,
(11:15):
and two if they're an offspring of Rick Barry. Anyway,
do you want to just quickly describe where we are
and what we're doing. That's my producer, Jacob Smith. He
hung out with some players on the Columbia University women's
basketball team and tried to get them to shoot underhanded.
Our theory was, maybe this is just a dumb man's thing.
(11:36):
Maybe women are more rational when they're on the court.
So we are in Columbia's basketball gym, and we are
going to compare overhand shooting to underhand shooting. Here. That's
Arra Talkov, a junior in the team. She missed her
first try. I feel like you could bend in the
knee a little more in that. Then she makes the
(11:59):
next two shots, her first two ever shooting underhanded. But
Jacob couldn't get any of the Columbia players interested in
switching over. Here's Sarah Meade, senior point guard. Ever since
we were young, we were taught to shoot it overhand,
and you know, as kids you kind of play around
with the idea of a granny shot or underhand, but yeah,
I'm not sure we've ever taken it seriously. She calls
(12:22):
it a granny shot, a shot used by one of
the greatest players ever to play the game. Women are
as bad as men. We like to think that good
ideas will spread because they're good, because their advantages are obvious.
But that's not true. So why don't they Or to
put it another way, what is it about Rick Barry
(12:42):
that allowed him to shoot this way? And what is
it about Wilt Chamberlain and all the others that stands
in their way? Let me try out a theory on you.
It's from a sociologist named Mark Grnovator. Grnovator is one
of the greatest social theorists of his generation. If you're
an academic groupie like I am, Granovator is like James Dean.
(13:05):
So Grannovator came up with something called the threshold model
of collective behavior. He was trying to answer the question
of why people do things out of character. Use riots
as his big example. Why do otherwise law abouting citizens
suddenly throw rocks through windows before Granovadda came along. Sociologists
(13:26):
tried to explain that kind of puzzling behavior in terms
of beliefs. So the thinking went, you and I have
a set of beliefs, but when you throw the rock
through the window, something powerful must have happened in the
moment to change your beliefs. Something about the crowd transforms
the way you think. Here's Granovetta explaining that idea. There
(13:50):
was a lot of intellectual tradition that said that when
people got into a crowd, their independent judgment went out
the window, and they somehow became creatures of the crowd,
and that there was some kind of measthma of irrationality
would settle over people and they would act in ways
that they would never act if they were by themselves
or they weren't influenced by the mob mentality. But Grana
(14:12):
Better doesn't buy it. He doesn't think that being part
of the mob casts some kind of spell that makes
everyone irrational. To his mind, it's much more subtle and
complicated than that. People are pretty much who they are.
But if the situation develops in a certain way, then
there's a domino effect. Some people are activated, and that
activates other people. That activates other people, and it all
(14:34):
happen so fast. Grana Better says that the issue isn't
about people having beliefs about what's right and then suddenly
losing those beliefs because they're in a mob. The issue
is about thresholds. Now, what does Granovetter mean by that
word threshold? A belief is an internal thing. It's a
(14:55):
position we've taken in our head or in our heart.
But unlike beliefs, thresholds are external. They're about pure pressure.
Your threshold is the number of people who have to
do something before you join in. Grenovador makes two crucial arguments.
The first is at thresholds and beliefs sometimes overlap, but
a lot of the time they don't. When your teenage
(15:18):
son is driving a hundred miles an hour at midnight
with three of his friends, it's not because he believes
that driving one hundred miles an hour is a good idea.
In that moment, his beliefs are irrelevant. His behavior is
guided by his threshold. An eighteen year old may be
drunk at midnight in a car with three of his friends.
That person has a really low threshold. It doesn't take
(15:41):
a lot of encouragement to get him to do something stupid.
Grenovador's second point is just as important. Everyone's threshold is different.
There are plenty of radicals and troublemakers who might need
only slight encouragement to throw that rock. Their threshold is
really low. But think about your grandmother. She might well
(16:02):
need her sister, her grandchildren, her neighbors, her friends from church,
all of them to be throwing rocks before or she
would even dream of joining in. She's got a high threshold.
The riot has to be going on for a very
long time and has to involve a whole lot of
people before Grandma will join in. Grannovator's argument goes on
(16:23):
in much more detail, all of it fascinating, and I
encourage you, if you're interested, to look it up online
and read it, because it's beautifully clear. But for the moment,
I just want to focus on the one big implication
of Granovator's argument. What people believe isn't going to help
you much. If you want to understand why they try
or don't try difficult or problematic or strange things, you
(16:48):
have to understand the social context in which they're operating.
Your grandmother's belief is that rioting is wrong, but there
are times when even grandmother's might throw rocks through windows.
Granovador's theory explained a lot of things that have been
puzzling to me. So here's a good example. It's from
an interview I did at the ninety second Street in
(17:09):
New York with the economist Richard Taylor, who's one of
the leading lights in what's called behavioral economics. He had
a book coming out called Misbehaving, and I really liked it,
and we thought it would be fun if we did
an event together. You and I have met before, the
first timing that was at a hotel bar in Rochester, yes,
(17:29):
the only time I've ever Taylor's a kind of guy
who's interested in everything, including sports, and there was a
point in our conversation when he started to talk about
the fact that the owners of professional football teams do
things on occasion that are really stupid and inexplicable. Take
the professional football draft. For those of you who are
(17:51):
not football fans, let me explain. Every year, all the
draft eligible college football players are thrown into a big pool,
and the thirty two professional football teams picked the players
they want one by one. The first player taken is
the one that people think will be the best professional
player that person, it's the biggest salary. The second player
(18:11):
taken is the one predicted to be the second best
professional player, and so on. And after every team has
picked one player each, they all start again and do
another round. Because the players selected in the first round
are considered the most valuable, all the teams fight over them.
They pay enormous sums of money and construct elaborate deals
(18:32):
to try and acquire those high draft picks. The interesting
thing about that is there's a market for picks, so
you can trade the first pick for say half a
dozen second round picks. That's what the market says. Now,
that implies that the first pick is five times more
(18:54):
valuable than an early pick in the second round. Filer
in a colleague named Kade Massey decide to analyze this assumption.
Was it really true that a first round pick was
worth half a dozen second round picks? If you compute
the surplus a player provides to his team, meaning how
good his performance is minus how much you have to
(19:18):
pay him. What we found is these second round picks
are actually more valuable than that first pick. But you
could get five of those for that pick. It's the
biggest anomaly I've ever found. The implication of Taylor in
Massey's work is the teams should trade away their first
round picks. They should stockpile players in the second and
(19:40):
third rounds who can be paid a lot less and
are nearly as good. This is how you build a
winning football team. So what was the reaction of NFL
teams to Taylor's idea. Well, not long after he and
cade Massey did their research, they got a call from
the Washington Redskins. It was early in Dan Snyder's tenure
(20:01):
as owner, and I met him and he said, oh,
we don't want to know about this, and he introduced me.
I'm going to send my people to see you, and
they flew out to Chicago. I met with Kate and
me and we told them what our findings were. And
we basically have two pieces of advice, trade down and
(20:23):
lend picks this year from picks next year. With that
last sentence, Taylor is referring to the second thing he
and Massey discovered. Owners sometimes trade a pick in this
year's draft for a pick in some future draft. They
use a rule of thumb to figure out how to
value the difference between a player you can use this
year versus a draft pick you can't use until some
(20:45):
future year. And Taylor and Massey discover that the rule
of thumb makes no sense. It's completely irrational. It massively
overvalues current picks and undervalues future picks. Like a good economist,
Faylor talks about the value of that rule of thumb
as an interest rate. It's like borrowing money. If you
compute the real interest rate, it's one hundred and thirty
(21:08):
seven percent per year. In other words, for the privilege
of having a player now, as opposed to waiting a year,
the owners pay a huge premium. They borrow money at
one hundred and thirty seven percent interest. These guys did
not get to be billionaires borrowing at one hundred and
thirty seven percent per year. But that's the rule of
thumb they use. So anyway, we taught his guys Stands
(21:31):
guys what to do, and then we watched the draft
eagerly that year, and they trade it up and borrowed
picked this year for one next year. So okay. In
other words, the Redskins did the exact opposite of what
they should have done if they were rational, and they
weren't the only ones. Kayler and Massi have consulted for
(21:53):
three NFL franchises now and no one has ever followed
their advice. It gets worse. There's a very respected economist
named David Rohmer who famously proved that football teams would
win more games if they didn't punt, if they simply
use all four days to try and gain ten yards
as opposed to giving the ball away to their opponents.
(22:14):
So since Romer published his work, our NFL teams less
likely to punt on fourth down? You guessed it. No
to tell you how bigness is if you did this right,
but we think you would win one game a year
more if you also learned to go for it more
(22:37):
often on fourth down another game and a half. So
just being smart, we win at least two games a
year on average, two extra wins in a sixteen game season,
just by acting a little bit differently. Who wouldn't do that?
But nobody would? Now? Is that because they're stupid, because
(23:01):
they have irrational beliefs? That was my first thought when
I was listening to Theater talk about his football research,
Those dumb football owners. But that can't be right, You
don't get to their level by being dumb. Surely this
is about thresholds. Football owners and coaches are a small
group of people. They all know each other, They've all
(23:21):
done things a certain way for a long time, and
doing things that way has made them a lot of money.
They have a high threshold. These are a bunch of grandmothers.
The only way any of them is going to change
their behavior is if some radical goes first. And there
are no radical owners in the NFL. There's just Richard Taylor,
(23:42):
a geeky middle aged economists from the University of Chicago
with a bunch of equations that you need a PhD
to understand. There's some geek at every team who's read
our paper. You know. Think of the Jonah Hill character
in the movie Bunny Ball. Yeah, right, and nobody pays
attention to that guy. Apparently there aren't a lot of
(24:08):
radical in basketball either, just the Berries and Shinano on Nuwaku,
the Nigerian American who plays for Louisville, and as it
turns out, Mark Granovada. When I was a teenager, and
this would have been mostly in summer camp because I
never really played basketball outside of summer camp, but I
got to be very good at underhand free throwing. Oh really, yeah, yeah,
(24:33):
I could make almost every shot. I was wrong. There
are three conditions under which someone will try this shot.
One if you're an offspring of rick Berry, two if
your family is from another continent, and three if you're
a world famous sociologist. This, I think gets us a
little closer to the puzzle of Chamberlain. In his autobiography,
(24:57):
he has this throwaway comment on the subject of shooting underhanded.
Chamberlain wrote, I felt silly like a sissy shooting underhanded.
I know I was wrong. I know some of the
best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now,
the best one in the NBA, Rick Berry, shoots underhanded.
I just couldn't do it. Two key things here. First,
(25:21):
he writes, I know I was wrong, just as Grennovetter
would say. It's not Chamberlain's beliefs that are getting in
the way. He knows it's wrong. Then I felt silly
like a sissy. Remember the player for Columbia who describes
shooting underhanded as a granny shot. That's what Chamberlain's talking about.
(25:42):
He's the one to look foolish. He's a high threshold guy.
He needs everyone to be doing something new before he's
willing to join in. But Rick Berry he's different. Rick
Berry's dad comes to him when he's a junior in
high school and says, you really ought to shoot underhanded.
Rick's a pretty good free throw shooter at that point,
(26:02):
maybe seventy percent or so, but his dad tells him
he can do better. And your initial reaction is I
don't want to do it right because it seemed to
you like, well, I can't do it. Think I mean it,
swear the girl I said that. I always remember, and
I tell you, Dad, they're going to make fun of me.
That's the way the girls shoot. I can't do that,
said son. And I remember this so clearly, like it
was yesterday. Son. They can't make fun of you if
(26:26):
you're making them. And the first game I remember where
I did it was on the road in scotch Plains,
New Jersey. I shot the free throw guy and stands
yells out, hey, Barry a big sissy shooting like that,
and the guy next to him and I heard it
very clearly, he said, what are you making fun of
him for? He doesn't miss? So my dad's prophecy came true,
(26:49):
and I was cool from that point four, So I
didn't care anymore what they said. If I'm making him,
that's all that really matters. What's interesting is that Barry
actually has the same initial reaction as Will Chamberlain. I'm
going to look like a sissy. But he thinks about
it and he decides it doesn't bother him, or rather,
his drive to be a better shooter is stronger than
(27:09):
his worry about what others think of him. That's exactly
what it means to have a low threshold. The same
mindset that can lead someone to do something bad, like
a teenager driving drunk with very little encouragement, can also
lead to brave or innovative behavior. If you have a
threshold of zero, you're someone who doesn't need the support,
(27:30):
or the approval or the company of others to do
what you think is right. Now here's the catch. The
person who thinks this way is not always easy to
be around. Barry was never embraced by his fellow players.
There were a couple of notorious articles about him in
the nineteen eighties full of quotes like this from a
former teammate. If you'd got to know Rick, you'd realize
(27:52):
what a good guy he was. But around the league
they thought of him as the most arrogant guy. Ever.
Half the players disliked Rick, the other half hated him.
Here's another quote, he lacks diplomacy. If they sent him
to the u N, he'd end up starting World War three. Yeah. Well,
I was about winning. I was about giving my best effort,
(28:12):
and I had a very difficult time accepting the fact
that I wouldn't accept the fact if a teammate is
not going to play his hardest. Barry's been out of
the game for more than thirty years, but just talking
about basketball made him tense. There was a right way
to play the game, and when people didn't play it
the right way, it drove him crazy. Watch a game, right,
guy shoots free throw, misses it, everybody goes up, slaps
(28:34):
his hand. What where the hell did that come from?
I want to know who the guy is, the guy
that started doing that, and who was the genius that said, man,
that's a great idea. Let's go up and you know,
slap the guy's hand and let's go up to sturbest concentration.
When he's supposed to be focusing on shooting his free
throws and worry about having to slap the hands of
his teammates. Do you hear what upsets him The social
part of the game, players paying attention to each other's
(28:56):
feelings as opposed to their own performance, plus the fact
if he misses it, you should go up and smack
him in the head from missing the free throw, not
slap him on the hands and saying it's okay. Because
it's not okay. You just cost us a point. I mean,
I go nuts when I watch this kind of stuff
and nobody even talks about that, And it's something that
somebody brought up, somebody copied, and now everybody does it,
and it's stupid. I just have a real problem with that.
(29:19):
Barry wrote an autobiography in nineteen seventy two called Confessions
of a Basketball Gypsy, which I have to say is
one of the strangest autobiographies I've ever read. There are
sections of the book Barry gives over to various people
in his life. They each tried a few pages, and
he seems to care not one iota about what these
people say about him. So here is his mother comparing
(29:42):
Barry to his older brother Dennis Rick has become famous
and made a lot of money. But what is that?
I think maybe Dennis leads the better life. Or here's
his dad defending him. There was an incidant in Miami,
for example, that was blown out of proportion. I have
it on good authority that the player's jaw was broken
when he hit the floor, not from Rick's punch. And
(30:05):
this is his wife describing how they first met. He
awful to me. He was always shoving me in the pool,
and I hated him for it. Oh, I could take it,
but there's always someone who goes too far, who does
it more than the others, beyond endurance, and for me,
that was Rick. I would not let my parents and
my wife say these things about me in my own autobiography. Yeah,
(30:29):
I'd let people say what they wanted. I didn't ask
for editorial rights to be able to go through and
see what they said and see although I don't want
that in the air, I don't say what they wanted
to say. He doesn't care. The kind of person who
would let bad things be said about him in his
own autobiography is the kind of person who would shoot
a free throw that other people think looks ridiculous. I
(30:55):
spent an afternoon Mcbury at his conduct, and I'd read
all that stuff about him. Half the players disliked him,
the other half hated him. And I kind of braced
myself before I met him. But I liked him, Or
maybe it makes more sense to say that I really
admired him because I finally understood what someone like Rick
Barry stands for. It's perfectionism. And what is a perfectionist?
(31:20):
Someone who puts the responsibility of mastering the task at
hand ahead of all social considerations. Who would rather be
right than liked? And how can you be good at
something complex? How can you reach your potential if you
don't have a little bit of that inside you. I
(31:42):
know we've really only been talking about basketball, which is
just a game in the end, But the lesson here
is much bigger than that. It takes courage to be
good social courage to be honest with yourself, to do
things the right way. Berry made me lunch, a perfectly
delicious homemade vegetable soup with an avocado salad, simple, nutritious.
(32:07):
When we finished, he cleaned up meticulously. He needed a
ride into Charleston, so he got into my rental car.
He turned off the heating, which had been on high
because the weather had warmed up. He carefully took my
rental agreement and tucked it into the sun visor. And
then when there was a sudden slowing of the traffic ahead,
and I breaked a moment too late, I saw his
(32:28):
foot come down in the passenger footwell, as if he
were breaking from me, Only he breaked just a fraction
of a second before me. Because he's Rick Barry and
he does things better than everyone else. And all the
while he told stories from his basketball days, recalling shots
and scores and things people said as if it were yesterday.
(32:50):
I think he understands the price he's paid for being
the way he is. He kept coming up, everybody should
have me as a friend. I'm a good friend. I'm
a loyal friend. I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm
gonna be there if you need me. I mean, I'm
a good friend. I'm a good person. I was brought
up the right way. I'm a good person. Yet a
lot of people don't think he's not describing an easy life,
(33:12):
but think of what he gained. Rick Berry was the
best basketball player he could possibly have been, and Wilt
Chamberlain could never say that he's got it. He's trying
to get up. It's almost incomprehensible to me that someone
can have that attitude to sacrifice their success over worrying
(33:35):
about how somebody feels about you. Where it says about you.
That's that's sad. Really, you've been listening to Revisionist History.
Sometimes the past deserves a second chance. If you like
(34:09):
what you've heard, we'd love it. If you rate us
on iTunes, it helps a lot. You can find more
information about this and other episodes at Revisionist history dot
com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is
produced by Meilabal Roxand Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor
is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Guerra and
(34:32):
Taka Yazoo Zawa. Flawan Williams is our engineer. Fact checker
Michelle Seracca. Thanks to the Penalty Management team Laura Mayor,
Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, so I
(34:53):
used to joke with wealth and God rest his soul.
I got to know him well later in my life
and said, you should have come to me with the
un You had horrible technique you know what. I'm going
to help you, but
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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