Article mentioning Vivek Ranadive

[bubulina]

This paragraph is from NYRB:
"His daughter was a member of the team and persuaded him to volunteer for the job. His disadvantage was the fact that he had grown up in India playing soccer and knew nothing at all about basketball. Because of his ignorance, he trained his girls to play the game like soccer players, constantly running fast after the ball and giving the opposing team no chance to take a breath. This was quite different from the customary way of playing basketball, which has the players concentrating their attention on defending the basket rather than on running. Vivek’s team trained hard and played hard, and soon began to beat the other teams who had superior skills but inferior endurance."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/how-to-be-underdog-and-win/

The author is paraphrasing one of the chapters in Malcolm Gladwell's "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

".


Gladwell is always a good read.

Those who want to read the article can send me a message. I have a subscription to NYRB and can send it to a few.

 

[bubulina]

This paragraph brought me to distant unpleasant memories of a certain Game 6:
"The Redwood City girls beat all the other local teams and ended up playing in the national championships. In the nationals they won their first two games, but then they ran into disaster. The third game was in a town where public opinion was bitterly hostile and the referee was unfair. The referee penalized them repeatedly, declaring their style of play to be illegal, and the public was enthusiastically on the side of the referee. Vivek understood that his girls had lost their legitimacy and there was no way they could win. He told them to play the way the referee wanted them to play. As a result, they lost the game and the championship. In peace as in war, the underdog does not always win."