Speaker 1: Bushkin. The greatest game of basketball anyone has ever played
Speaker 1: was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, March second, nineteen.
Speaker 2: Sixty two, and everybody's thinking out on his work.
Speaker 3: God, I got he's got sixty nine gone at here's
Speaker 3: the past.
Speaker 4: He's got another.
Speaker 1: Cold, rainy night. Just over four thousand people in the stands.
Speaker 1: Philadelphia Warriors versus.
Speaker 4: The New York Knicks have a good shot. They're taking it,
Speaker 4: but mostly they're setting up the big man.
Speaker 1: The star of the Warriors was a man named Wilt Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: No doubt you've heard of him, seven foot one, two
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy five pounds. For sheer physical presence, there
Speaker 1: has probably never been anyone like Willed. There are lots
Speaker 1: of seven footers who play basketball who are basically on
Speaker 1: the court purely because they're seven feet tall. They're clumsy
Speaker 1: and ungainly. Chamberlain, it was not like that. He was
Speaker 1: as big as an oak tree and as graceful as
Speaker 1: a ballet dancer. That season nineteen sixty one to nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two, he ended up averaging more than fifty points
Speaker 1: a game. That record will never be broken. So March second,
Speaker 1: Wilt was hungover. He'd been out all night with a
Speaker 1: woman he picked up at a bar. That's classic Will too.
Speaker 1: He would later claim to have slept with twenty thousand
Speaker 1: women in his life. And when he said that, lots
Speaker 1: of people did the math and said there was no
Speaker 1: way that was possible, given the fact that they were
Speaker 1: only twenty four hours in a day and will only
Speaker 1: live to the age of sixty three. But even the
Speaker 1: skeptics were like, well, maybe it's ten thousand or eight thousand.
Speaker 1: It was an argument over whether it was an unbelievably
Speaker 1: high number or merely an incredibly high number.
Speaker 2: The big Man over the Warriors and the big man
Speaker 2: in the he has ninety two points.
Speaker 4: Jaron, make sure my.
Speaker 1: Name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, where
Speaker 1: every week we re examine the forgotten and the misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This week's episode is about Wilt Chamberlain's most famous game.
Speaker 4: Work's got the ball, he's gone up, he shoots, So.
Speaker 1: Back to the game in question. Chamberlain makes his first
Speaker 1: five shots and has twenty three points at the end
Speaker 1: of the first quarter. At halftime, he has forty one points.
Speaker 1: No one's thinking history just yet. But then by the
Speaker 1: end of the third quarter, he has sixty nine points,
Speaker 1: and he keeps going and going and going. He shoots
Speaker 1: put it out the reason Luck and Bill.
Speaker 3: K so Rockwick in the chamber.
Speaker 1: A hundred points, the most anyone has ever scored in
Speaker 1: a professional basketball game. And here's the most incredible thing
Speaker 1: about it. He shot brilliantly from the foul liney or
Speaker 1: thirty two Ye. That's Rick Berry speaking. He was a
Speaker 1: contemporary of Chamberlain's, also a Hall of Famer, an absolutely
Speaker 1: unstoppable scorer. I met him at his condo in South
Speaker 1: Carolina where he lives part of the year, so we
Speaker 1: can follow his son, Canyon, who plays basketball for the
Speaker 1: College of Charleston. Barry is seventy two, six foot eight
Speaker 1: inches tall, barrel chest, legs that looked like he had
Speaker 1: special extensions put on them, and that thing that great
Speaker 1: athletes have and never seem to lose, which is that
Speaker 1: they kind of glide across the floor like they have
Speaker 1: wheels on. A big part of this episode is about Barry,
Speaker 1: but other people too, because although this sounds like it's
Speaker 1: going to be a show about basketball, the truth is
Speaker 1: it's not. It's a show about good Eyedea. He is
Speaker 1: and why they have such difficulties spreading. But for the moment,
Speaker 1: back to Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain next, He's made twenty eight
Speaker 1: out of his thirty two shots from the free throw line,
Speaker 1: eighty seven point five percent. The reason that's incredible is
Speaker 1: that when Chamberlain came into the NBA, he was a
Speaker 1: horrendous free throw shooter. Though worst. Here was a man
Speaker 1: who could excel at virtually every physical feat under the sun,
Speaker 1: who could score at will with two and sometimes three
Speaker 1: defenders draped all over his body, but put him all
Speaker 1: alone fifteen feet from the basket, and he was hopeless.
Speaker 1: He was shooting forty percent from the free throw line.
Speaker 1: That's terrible. But this season Chamberlain changes tactics. He starts
Speaker 1: to shoot his foul shots underhanded. He doesn't release the
Speaker 1: ball up by his forehead. He holds the ball between
Speaker 1: his knees and flicks it towards the basket from a
Speaker 1: slight crouch, and all of a sudden, he's a pretty
Speaker 1: good free throw shooter. He gets up to more than
Speaker 1: sixty percent, and that special night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he's
Speaker 1: an incredible free.
Speaker 3: Throw shooter on the line.
Speaker 1: Pal shot up in the area is eighty four. He
Speaker 1: makes twenty eight free throws, the most anyone has ever
Speaker 1: made in NBA history. What Rick Barry will tell you
Speaker 1: is that shooting underhanded is simply a better way to
Speaker 1: make foul shots. And he knows that because he was
Speaker 1: one of the greatest foul shooters of all time, maybe
Speaker 1: the greatest.
Speaker 4: I missed ten in one season and nine in another
Speaker 4: and the whole season.
Speaker 1: To put that in perspective, Lebron James, the greatest player
Speaker 1: of the current basketball generation, typically misses about one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty free throws a season. Rick Barry would miss
Speaker 1: nine or ten.
Speaker 4: I think I shot ninety three five or something in
Speaker 4: ninety four to seven, something like that.
Speaker 1: And Rick Berry only shot underhanded.
Speaker 4: From a physics standpoint, it's a much better way to shoot.
Speaker 4: Less things that can go wrong, Less things that you
Speaker 4: have to worry about repeating properly in order for it
Speaker 4: to be successful. But the other thing is is that
Speaker 4: who walks around like this hand This is not a
Speaker 4: natural position when I shoot underhanded free throws. Where are
Speaker 4: my arms hanging straight down the way they are normally?
Speaker 4: And so I'm totally completely relaxed. It's not in the
Speaker 4: situation where I have to worry about my muscles getting
Speaker 4: tense or tight. And then the shot itself, it's a
Speaker 4: softer shot. So many of my shots, even if they're
Speaker 4: a little off, they hit so nice and soft, and
Speaker 4: they'll still fall in the much softer touch, and so
Speaker 4: you have a little bit more margin for error. Some
Speaker 4: of those shots that are a little bit offline have
Speaker 4: a much better opportunity of going into the basket than
Speaker 4: when you shoot overhand.
Speaker 1: So Wilt Chamberlain switches to a better shooting technique. It
Speaker 1: pays off. In the greatest basketball game ever played. He's
Speaker 1: playing the way that Rick Berry proved basketball players ought
Speaker 1: to play. Then something incredible happens. Well, Chamberlain stops shooting underhanded,
Speaker 1: and he goes back to being a terrible foul shooter.
Speaker 1: Let's think about what he did for a moment. Chamberlain
Speaker 1: had a problem, he tested out a possible solution, the
Speaker 1: solution worked, and all of a sudden, he's fixed his
Speaker 1: biggest weakness as a player. This is not a trivial matter.
Speaker 1: If you're a basketball player and you can't hit your
Speaker 1: free throws, you're an incredible liability to your team, particularly
Speaker 1: at the end of close games. The other side simply
Speaker 1: fouls you every time you touch the ball because they
Speaker 1: know you'll miss your free throw and they'll get the
Speaker 1: ball back. If you can't hit your foul shots, it
Speaker 1: means you can't be used in a tight game. You
Speaker 1: know what Chamberlain's coach said to him, if you were
Speaker 1: a ninety percent shooter, we might never lose. You got
Speaker 1: to know him quite well.
Speaker 4: I got to know him.
Speaker 3: You don't.
Speaker 4: I just joked with him. You said your technique was terrible.
Speaker 4: I mean, but I mean had you stuck with it,
Speaker 4: I mean, there's no tell him what he would have done.
Speaker 4: I mean, the numbers he would have put up would
Speaker 4: have been insane because the only way they defended him
Speaker 4: was the fallom.
Speaker 1: Chamberlain had every incentive in the world to keep shooting
Speaker 1: free throws underhanded, and he didn't. I think we understand
Speaker 1: cases where people don't do what they ought to do
Speaker 1: because of ignorance. This is not that this is doing
Speaker 1: something dumb, even though you are fully aware that you're
Speaker 1: doing something dumb. By the way, there have been countless
Speaker 1: players like Chamberlain, players who could have been transcendent, devastating
Speaker 1: if only they had been open to taking foul shots
Speaker 1: a different way. Take Shaquille O'Neal up there with Will Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: Is one of the greatest NBA centers of all time,
Speaker 1: but an absolutely horrendous free throw shooter. Barry tried to
Speaker 1: reason with him once.
Speaker 4: Oh, you actually talked to shit. I tried to get
Speaker 4: Shack to change, and I try to get him done.
Speaker 4: He said, forget, I'd rather shoot zero than shoot underhanded.
Speaker 1: And I'm just fascinated by that.
Speaker 4: I don't understand it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, The difference is if Shaq was an eighty percent
Speaker 4: free throw shooter, he becomes the go to guy on
Speaker 4: the court as opposed to go to the bench guy.
Speaker 4: You change the dynamic of the game.
Speaker 1: No one shoots underhanded. Not even Barry's teammates followed his lead,
Speaker 1: people who saw him shoot that way every day and
Speaker 1: never miss one.
Speaker 3: Guy.
Speaker 4: Only George Johnson, my teammate with the Warriors, he was
Speaker 4: I think he was like forty eight fifty percent something
Speaker 4: like that, and I worked with him for one season.
Speaker 4: I didn't get to stay with him. He didn't get
Speaker 4: the technique down as much as I'd like it, But
Speaker 4: I think eventually, a season or two later, I think
Speaker 4: George actually shot eighty percent. I can actually look it
Speaker 4: up and be interesting to see what he did. I'll
Speaker 4: get George Johnson's stats here everything George Johnson's stats. Okay,
Speaker 4: stats for George Johnson NBA are George.
Speaker 1: Johnson's stats from the twenty fifteen NFL season.
Speaker 4: NFL wrong guy, wrong season, I mean, but anyway, we'll
Speaker 4: look it up. It's interesting, I think.
Speaker 1: But what about your on your high school team?
Speaker 5: Did anyone follow Oh?
Speaker 4: No, nobody. I've only had one guy ever come to me.
Speaker 4: An NBA guy came to me. I'm will tell you
Speaker 4: his name, but he came to me. He asked me
Speaker 4: to work with him. I did it. I worked with him.
Speaker 4: I had him shooting really well, and he never had
Speaker 4: the nerve to go back and do it. You want
Speaker 4: to talk his name, it's not it's fair to him.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say his name. It's not fair
Speaker 1: to him, like it's some kind of dark, shameful secret.
Speaker 1: College basketball is no different. Out of the thousands of
Speaker 1: college basketball players today, there are just two who shoot underhanded.
Speaker 1: One is a Nigerian American who plays for Louisville called
Speaker 1: Chinanu Anuaku. The other is Kenyon Barry, who plays for
Speaker 1: the College of Charleston, and who, in case he missed
Speaker 1: this earlier, happens to be Rick Barry's son. In other words,
Speaker 1: there are only two conditions under which people will try
Speaker 1: the underhanded free throw, one if their family is from
Speaker 1: another continent, and two if they're an offspring of Rick Berry.
Speaker 3: Anyway, do you want to just quickly describe where we
Speaker 3: are and what we're doing.
Speaker 1: That's my producer, Jacob Smith. He hung out with some
Speaker 1: players on the Columbia University women's basketball team and tried
Speaker 1: to get them to shoot underhanded. Our theory was, maybe
Speaker 1: this is just a dumb man's thing. Maybe women are
Speaker 1: more rational when they're on the court.
Speaker 3: So we are in Columbia's basketball gym and we are
Speaker 3: going to compare overhand shooting to underhand shooting. Hey, here
Speaker 3: he goes.
Speaker 1: That's er Talkov, a junior in the team. She missed
Speaker 1: her first try.
Speaker 2: I feel like you could bend in the kne a
Speaker 2: little more on that that.
Speaker 1: Then she makes the next two shots, her first two
Speaker 1: ever shooting underhanded. But Jacob couldn't get any of the
Speaker 1: Columbia players interested in switching over. Here's Sarah Mead, senior
Speaker 1: point guard.
Speaker 3: Ever since we were young, we were taught to shoot
Speaker 3: it overhand, and you know, as kids, you kind of
Speaker 3: play around with the idea of a granny shot or underhand.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I'm not sure we've ever taken it seriously.
Speaker 1: She calls it a granny shot, a shot used by
Speaker 1: one of the greatest players ever to play the game.
Speaker 1: Women are as bad as men. We like to think
Speaker 1: that good ideas will spread because they're good, because their
Speaker 1: advantages are obvious. But that's not true. So why don't
Speaker 1: they Or to put it another way, what is it
Speaker 1: about Rick Berry that allowed him to shoot this way?
Speaker 1: And what is it about Wilt Chamberlain and all the
Speaker 1: others that stands in their way? Let me try out
Speaker 1: a theory on you. It's from a sociologist named Mark Granovetter.
Speaker 1: Granavetter is one of the greatest social theorists of his generation.
Speaker 1: If you're an academic groupie like I am, Granavetter is
Speaker 1: like James Dean. So Granoveter came up with something called
Speaker 1: the threshold model of collective behavior. He was trying to
Speaker 1: answer the question of why people do things out of character.
Speaker 1: Use riots as his big example, why do otherwise law
Speaker 1: abiding citizens suddenly throw rocks through windows? Before Granavetter came along,
Speaker 1: sociologists tried to explain that kind of puzzling behavior in
Speaker 1: terms of beliefs. So the thinking went, you and I
Speaker 1: have a set of beliefs, but when you throw the
Speaker 1: rock through the window, something powerful must have happened in
Speaker 1: the moment to change your beliefs. Something about the crowd
Speaker 1: transforms the way you think. Here's Granavetter explaining that idea.
Speaker 5: There was a lot of intellectual tradition that said that
Speaker 5: when people got into a crowd, their independent judgment went
Speaker 5: out the window, and that they somehow became creatures of
Speaker 5: the crowd, and that there was some kind of I
Speaker 5: don't know, miasma of irrationality would settle over people and
Speaker 5: they would act in ways that they would never act
Speaker 5: if they were by themselves or they weren't influenced by
Speaker 5: the mob mentality.
Speaker 1: But Granna Better doesn't buy it. He doesn't think that
Speaker 1: being part of the mob casts some kind of spell
Speaker 1: that makes everyone irrational. To his mind, it's much more
Speaker 1: subtle and complicated.
Speaker 3: Than that.
Speaker 5: People are pretty much who they are, But if the
Speaker 5: situation develops in a certain way, then there's a domino effect.
Speaker 5: Some people are activated and that activates other people in
Speaker 5: that activates other people, and it all happens so fast.
Speaker 1: Granaveetter says that the issue isn't about people having beliefs
Speaker 1: about what's right and then suddenly losing those beliefs because
Speaker 1: they're in a mob. The issue is about thresholds. Now,
Speaker 1: what does Granaveetter mean by that word threshold? A belief
Speaker 1: is an internal thing. It's a position we've taken in
Speaker 1: our head or in our heart. But unlike beliefs, thresholds
Speaker 1: are external. They're about pure pressure. Your threshold is the
Speaker 1: number of people who have to do something before you
Speaker 1: join in. Granavedterer makes two crucial arguments. The first is
Speaker 1: that thresholds and beliefs sometimes overlap, but a lot of
Speaker 1: the time they don't. When your teenage son is driving
Speaker 1: one hundred miles an hour at midnight with three of
Speaker 1: his friends, it's not because he believes that driving one
Speaker 1: hundred miles an hour is a good idea. In that moment,
Speaker 1: his beliefs are irrelevant. His behavior is guided by his threshold.
Speaker 1: An eighteen year old may be drunk at midnight in
Speaker 1: a car with three of his friends. That person has
Speaker 1: a really low threshold. It doesn't take a lot of
Speaker 1: encouragement to get him to do something stupid. Granavetter's second
Speaker 1: point is just as important. Everyone's threshold is different. There
Speaker 1: are plenty of radicals and troublemakers who might need only
Speaker 1: slight encouragement to throw that rock. Their threshold is really low.
Speaker 1: But think about your grandmother. She might well need her sister,
Speaker 1: her grandchildren, her neighbors, or friends from church, all of
Speaker 1: them to be throwing rocks before or she would even
Speaker 1: dream of joining in. She's got a high threshold. The
Speaker 1: riot has to be going on for a very long
Speaker 1: time and has to involve a whole lot of people
Speaker 1: before Grandma will join in. Granavetter's argument goes on in
Speaker 1: much more detail, all of it fascinating, and I encourage you,
Speaker 1: if you're interested, to look it up online and read
Speaker 1: it because it's beautifully clear. But for the moment, I
Speaker 1: just want to focus on the one big implication of
Speaker 1: Grandavetter's argument. What people believe isn't going to help you much.
Speaker 1: If you want to understand why they try or don't
Speaker 1: try difficult or problematic or strange things. You have to
Speaker 1: understand the social context in which they're operating. Your grandmother's
Speaker 1: belief is that rioting is wrong, but there are times
Speaker 1: when even grandmothers might throw rocks through windows. Granavetter's theory
Speaker 1: explained a lot of things that have been puzzling to me.
Speaker 1: So here's a good example. It's from an interview I
Speaker 1: did at the ninety second Street Wall in New York
Speaker 1: with the economist Richard Thaylor, who's one of the leading
Speaker 1: lights in what's called behavioral economics. He had a book
Speaker 1: coming out called Misbehaving, and I really liked it, and
Speaker 1: we thought it would be fun if we did an
Speaker 1: event together. You and I have met before. The first
Speaker 1: time we met was at a hotel bar in Rochester, Yes,
Speaker 1: the only time I've ever Faylor is the kind of
Speaker 1: guy who's interested in everything, including sports, and there was
Speaker 1: a point in our conversation when he started to talk
Speaker 1: about the fact that the owners of professional football teams
Speaker 1: do things on occasion that are really stupid and inexplicable.
Speaker 1: Take the professional football draft. For those of you who
Speaker 1: are not football fans. Let me explain. Every year, all
Speaker 1: the draft eligible college football players are thrown into a
Speaker 1: big pool, and the thirty two professional football teams pick
Speaker 1: the players they want one by one. The first player
Speaker 1: taken as the one that people think will be the
Speaker 1: best professional player. That person gets it's the biggest salary.
Speaker 1: The second player taken is the one predicted to be
Speaker 1: the second best professional player, and so on. And after
Speaker 1: every team has picked one player each, they all start
Speaker 1: again and do another round. Because the players selected in
Speaker 1: the first round are considered the most valuable, all the
Speaker 1: teams fight over them. They pay enormous sums of money
Speaker 1: and construct elaborate deals to try and acquire those high
Speaker 1: draft picks.
Speaker 2: The interesting thing about that is there's a market for picks,
Speaker 2: so you can trade the first pick for say, half
Speaker 2: a dozen second round picks. That's what the market says. Now,
Speaker 2: that implies that the first pick is five times more
Speaker 2: valuable than an early pick in the second round.
Speaker 1: Filer in a colleague named Kade Massey decide to analyze
Speaker 1: this assumption. Was it really true that a first round
Speaker 1: pick was worth half a dozen second round.
Speaker 2: Picks if you compute the surplus a player provides to
Speaker 2: his team, meaning how good his performance is minus how
Speaker 2: much you have to pay him. What we found is
Speaker 2: these second round picks are actually more valuable than that
Speaker 2: first pick, but you could get five of those for
Speaker 2: that pick. It's the biggest anomaly I've ever found.
Speaker 1: The implication of Taylor in Massey's work is that teams
Speaker 1: should trade away their first round picks. They should stockpile
Speaker 1: players in the second and third rounds who can be
Speaker 1: paid a lot less and are nearly as good. This
Speaker 1: is how you build a winning football team. So what
Speaker 1: was the reaction of NFL teams to Taylor's idea. Well,
Speaker 1: not long after he and Kate Massey did their research,
Speaker 1: they got a call from the Washington Redskins.
Speaker 2: It was early in Dan Snyder's tenure as owner, and
Speaker 2: I met him and he said, oh, we don't want
Speaker 2: to know about this, and he introduced me. I'm going
Speaker 2: to send my people to see you, and they flew
Speaker 2: out to Chicago. I met with Gad and me and
Speaker 2: we told them what our findings were. And we basically
Speaker 2: have two pieces of advice, trade down and lend picks
Speaker 2: this year for picks next year.
Speaker 1: With that last sentence, Taylor is referring to the second
Speaker 1: thing he and Massy discovered. Owners sometimes trade a pick
Speaker 1: in this year's draft for a pick in some future draft.
Speaker 1: They use a rule of thumb to figure out how
Speaker 1: to value the difference between a player you can use
Speaker 1: this year versus a draft pick you can't use until
Speaker 1: some future year. And Taylor and Massy discover that the
Speaker 1: rule of thumb makes no sense. It's completely irrational. It
Speaker 1: massively overvalues current picks and undervalues future picks. Like a
Speaker 1: good economist, Taylor talks about the value of that rule
Speaker 1: of thumb as an interest rate. It's like borrowing money.
Speaker 2: If you compute the real interest rate, it's one hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty seven percent per year.
Speaker 1: In other words, for the privilege of having a player now,
Speaker 1: as opposed to waiting a year, the owners pay a
Speaker 1: huge premium. They borrow money at one hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: seven percent interest.
Speaker 2: These guys did not get to be billionaires borrowing at
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirty seven percent per year, But that's
Speaker 2: the rule of thumb they use. So anyway, we taught
Speaker 2: his guys Stans guys what to do, and then we
Speaker 2: watched the draft eagerly that year, and they traded up
Speaker 2: and borrowed a picked this year for one next year.
Speaker 2: So okay.
Speaker 1: In other words, the Redskins did the exact opposite of
Speaker 1: what they should have done if they were rational, and
Speaker 1: they weren't the only ones. Dyla and Massi have consulted
Speaker 1: for three NFL franchises now and no one has ever
Speaker 1: followed their advice. It gets worse. There's a very respected
Speaker 1: economist named David Romer who famously proved that football teams
Speaker 1: would win more games if they didn't punt, if they
Speaker 1: simply use all four dens to try and gain ten
Speaker 1: yards as opposed to giving the ball away to their opponents.
Speaker 1: So since Romer published his work, are NFL teams less
Speaker 1: likely to punt on fourth down? You guessed it?
Speaker 2: No to tell you how big this is if you
Speaker 2: did this right, But we think you would win one
Speaker 2: game a year more if you also learned to go
Speaker 2: for it more often on fourth down another game and
Speaker 2: a half. So, just being smart, we win at least
Speaker 2: two games a year on average.
Speaker 1: Two extra wins in a sixteen game season, just by
Speaker 1: acting a little bit differently. Who wouldn't do that? But
Speaker 1: nobody would? Now is that because they're stupid, because they
Speaker 1: have irrational beliefs. That was my first thought when I
Speaker 1: was listening to Theodore talk about his football research. Those
Speaker 1: dumb football owners. But that can't be right. You don't
Speaker 1: get to their level by being dumb. Surely this is
Speaker 1: about thresholds. Football owners and coaches are a small group
Speaker 1: of people. They all know each other, They've all done
Speaker 1: things a certain way for a long time, and doing
Speaker 1: things that way has made them a lot of money.
Speaker 1: They have a high threshold. These are a bunch of grandmothers.
Speaker 1: The only way any of them is going to change
Speaker 1: their behavior is if some radical goes first. And there
Speaker 1: are no radical owners in the NFL. There's just Richard Taylor,
Speaker 1: a geeky, middle aged economist from the University of Chicago
Speaker 1: with a bunch of equations that you need a PhD
Speaker 1: to understand.
Speaker 2: There's some geek at every team who's read our paper.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Think of the Jonah Hill character in the movie Bunny Ball. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: and nobody pays attention to that guy.
Speaker 1: Apparently there aren't a lot of radical in basketball either,
Speaker 1: just the Berries and Shinano Ouaku, the Nigerian American who
Speaker 1: plays for Louisville, And as it turns out, Mark granavetter.
Speaker 5: When I was a teenager, and this would have been
Speaker 5: mostly in summer camp, because I never really played basketball
Speaker 5: outside of summer camp. But I got to be very
Speaker 5: good at underhand frees throwing. Oh really, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 5: could make almost every shot.
Speaker 1: I was wrong. There are three conditions under which someone
Speaker 1: will try this shot. One if you're an offspring of
Speaker 1: Rick Berry, two if your family is from another continent,
Speaker 1: and three if you're a world famous sociologist. This, I
Speaker 1: think gets us a little closer to the puzzle of Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: In his autobiography, he has this throwaway comment on the
Speaker 1: subject of shooting underhanded. Chamberlain wrote, I felt silly like
Speaker 1: a sissy shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I
Speaker 1: know some of the best foul shooters in history shot
Speaker 1: that way. Even now, the best one in the NBA,
Speaker 1: Rick Berry, shoots underhanded. I just couldn't do it. Two
Speaker 1: key things here. First, he writes, I know I was wrong,
Speaker 1: just as Granavetta would say, it's not Chamberlain's beliefs that
Speaker 1: are getting in the way. He knows it's wrong. Then
Speaker 1: I felt silly like a sissy. Remember the player for
Speaker 1: Columbia who described shooting underhanded as a granny shot. That's
Speaker 1: what Chamberlain's talking about. He is the one who look foolish.
Speaker 1: He's a high threshold guy. He needs everyone to be
Speaker 1: doing something new before he's willing to join in. But
Speaker 1: Rick Berry, he's different. Rick Barry's dad comes to him
Speaker 1: when he's a junior in high school and says, you
Speaker 1: really ought to shoot underhanded. Rick's a pretty good free
Speaker 1: throw shooter at that point, maybe seventy percent or so,
Speaker 1: but his dad tells him he can do better. And
Speaker 1: your initial reaction is I don't want to do it
Speaker 1: right because it seemed to you like.
Speaker 4: A well, I can't do it. I mean, it's with
Speaker 4: the girl. I said that. I always remember it, and
Speaker 4: I tell you, Dad, they're going to make fun of me.
Speaker 4: That's the way the girls shoot. I can't do that,
Speaker 4: said son. And I remember this so clearly, like it
Speaker 4: was yesterday. Son. They can't make fun of you if
Speaker 4: you're making them. And the first game I remember where
Speaker 4: I did it was on the road in scotch Plains,
Speaker 4: New Jersey. I shot the free throw guy in the
Speaker 4: stands yells out, Hey, Barry a big sissy shooting like that,
Speaker 4: and the guy next to him and I heard it
Speaker 4: very clearly, he said, what are you making fun of
Speaker 4: him for? He doesn't miss? So my dad's prophecy came
Speaker 4: true and I was cool from that point forward, So
Speaker 4: I didn't care anymore what they said. If I'm making
Speaker 4: him that's all it really matters.
Speaker 1: What's interesting is that Barry actually has the same initial
Speaker 1: reaction as Wilt Chamberlain. I'm going to look like a sissy.
Speaker 1: But he thinks about it and he decides it doesn't
Speaker 1: bother him, or rather, his drive to be a better
Speaker 1: shooter is stronger than his worry about what others think
Speaker 1: of him. That's exactly what it means to have a
Speaker 1: low threshold. The same mindset that can lead someone to
Speaker 1: do something bad, like a teenager driving drunk with very
Speaker 1: little encouragement, can also lead to brave or innovative behavior.
Speaker 1: If you have a threshold of zero, you're someone who
Speaker 1: doesn't need the support, or the approval or the company
Speaker 1: of otters to do what you think is right. Now
Speaker 1: here's the catch. The person who thinks this way is
Speaker 1: not always easy to be around. Barry was never embraced
Speaker 1: by his fellow players. There were a couple of notorious
Speaker 1: articles about him in the nineteen eighties, full of quotes
Speaker 1: like this from a former teammate. If you'd got to
Speaker 1: know Rick, you'd realize what a good guy he was.
Speaker 1: But around the league they thought of him as the
Speaker 1: most arrogant guy.
Speaker 4: Ever.
Speaker 1: Half the players disliked Rick, the other half hated him.
Speaker 1: Here's another quote. He lacks diplomacy. If they sent him
Speaker 1: to the UN he'd ended up starting World War III.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I was about winning. I was about giving my
Speaker 4: best effort, and I had a very difficult time accepting
Speaker 4: the fact. I wouldn't accept the fact if a teammate
Speaker 4: is not going to play his hardest.
Speaker 1: Barry's been out of the game for more than thirty years,
Speaker 1: but just talking about basketball made him tense. There was
Speaker 1: a right way to play the game, and when people
Speaker 1: didn't play it the right way, it drove him crazy.
Speaker 4: Watch a game, right, guy shoots free throw, misses it,
Speaker 4: everybody goes up, slaps his hand. Where the hell did
Speaker 4: that come from? I want to know who the guy is,
Speaker 4: the guy that started doing that, and who was the
Speaker 4: genius that said, man, that's a great idea, let's go
Speaker 4: up and you know, slap the guy's hand and let's
Speaker 4: go up, disturb his concentration when he's supposed to be
Speaker 4: focusing on shooting his free throws, and worry about having
Speaker 4: to slap the hands of his teammates.
Speaker 1: Do you hear what upsets him? The social part of
Speaker 1: the game, players paying attention to each other's feelings as
Speaker 1: opposed to their own performance.
Speaker 4: Plus the fact if he misses it, you should go
Speaker 4: up and smack him in the head for missing the
Speaker 4: free throw, not slap him on the hands and saying
Speaker 4: it's okay. Because it's not okay. You just cost us
Speaker 4: a point. I mean, I go nuts when I watch
Speaker 4: this kind of stuff and nobody even talks about that,
Speaker 4: and it's something that somebody brought up, somebody copied, and
Speaker 4: now everybody does it, and it's stupid. I just have
Speaker 4: a real problem with that.
Speaker 1: Barry wrote an autobiography in nineteen seventy two called Confessions
Speaker 1: of a Basketball Gypsy, which I have to say is
Speaker 1: one of the strangest autobiographies I've ever read. There are
Speaker 1: sections of the book Barry gives over to various people
Speaker 1: in his life. They each write a few pages, and
Speaker 1: he seems to care not one iota about what these
Speaker 1: people say about him. So here is his mother comparing
Speaker 1: Barry to his older brother Dennis. Rick has become famous
Speaker 1: and made a lot of money. But what is that?
Speaker 1: I think maybe Dennis leads the better life. Or here's
Speaker 1: his dad defending him. There was an incident in Miami,
Speaker 1: for example, that was blown out of proportion. I have
Speaker 1: it on good authority that the player's jaw was broken
Speaker 1: when he hit the floor, not from Rick's punch. And
Speaker 1: this is his wife describing how they first met. He
Speaker 1: was awful to me. He was always shoving me in
Speaker 1: the pool, and I hated him for it. Oh, I
Speaker 1: could take it. But there's always someone who goes too far,
Speaker 1: who does it more than the others, beyond endurance, and
Speaker 1: for me, that was Rick. I would not let my
Speaker 1: parents and my wife say these things about me in
Speaker 1: my own autobiography.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'd let people say what they wanted to I
Speaker 4: didn't ask for editorial rights to be able to go
Speaker 4: through and see what they said and see, oh no,
Speaker 4: I don't want that in there. I let him say
Speaker 4: what they wanted to say.
Speaker 1: He doesn't care the kind of person who would let
Speaker 1: bad things be said about him in his own autobiography.
Speaker 1: Is the kind of person who would shoot a free
Speaker 1: throw that other people think looks ridiculous. I spent an
Speaker 1: afternoon with Burry at his condo, and I'd read all
Speaker 1: that stuff about him. Half the players disliked him, the
Speaker 1: other half hated him. And I kind of braced myself
Speaker 1: before I met him. But I liked him, Or maybe
Speaker 1: it makes more sense to say that I really admired
Speaker 1: him because I finally understood what someone like Rick Berry
Speaker 1: stands for. It's perfectionism. And what is a perfectionist? Someone
Speaker 1: who puts the responsibility of mastering the task at hand
Speaker 1: ahead of all social considerations. Who would rather be right
Speaker 1: than liked? And how can you be good at something complex?
Speaker 1: How can you reach your potential if you don't have
Speaker 1: a little bit of that inside you. I know, we've
Speaker 1: really only been talking about basketball, which is just a
Speaker 1: game in the end, But the lesson here is much
Speaker 1: bigger than that. It takes courage to be good social
Speaker 1: courage to be honest with yourself, to do things the
Speaker 1: right way. Berry made me lunch, a perfectly delicious homemade
Speaker 1: vegetable soup with an avocado salad, simple, nutritious. When we finished,
Speaker 1: he cleaned up meticulously. He needed a ride into Charleston,
Speaker 1: so he got into my rental car. He turned off
Speaker 1: the heating, which had been on high because the weather
Speaker 1: had warmed up. He carefully took my rental agreement and
Speaker 1: tucked it into the sun visor. And then when there
Speaker 1: was a sudden slowing of the traffic ahead, and I
Speaker 1: breaked a moment too late. I saw his foot come
Speaker 1: down in the passenger foot well, as if he were
Speaker 1: breaking from me. Only he breaked just a fraction of
Speaker 1: a second before me, because he's Rick Barry, and he
Speaker 1: does things better than everyone else. And all the while
Speaker 1: he told stories from his basketball days, recalling shots and
Speaker 1: scores and things people said as if it were yesterday.
Speaker 1: I think he understands the price he's paid for being
Speaker 1: the way he is. It kept coming up.
Speaker 4: Everybody should have me as a friend. I'm a good friend.
Speaker 4: I'm a loyal friend. I'm gonna be honest with you.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna be there if you need me. I mean,
Speaker 4: i'm a good friend. I'm a good person. I was
Speaker 4: brought up the right way. I'm a good person. Yet
Speaker 4: a lot of people don't think.
Speaker 1: He's not describing an easy life, but think of what
Speaker 1: he gained. Rick Berry was the best basketball player he
Speaker 1: could possibly have been, and Wilt Chamberlain could never.
Speaker 4: Say that he's gone.
Speaker 2: He's trying to get up.
Speaker 4: It's almost incomprehensible to me that someone could have that
Speaker 4: attitude to sacrifice their success over worrying about how somebody
Speaker 4: feels about you, what it says about you. That's that's sad.
Speaker 1: Really, you've been listening to revisionist history. Sometimes the past
Speaker 1: deserves a second chance. If you like what you've heard,
Speaker 1: we'd love it. If you rate us on iTunes, it
Speaker 1: helps a lot. You can find more information about this
Speaker 1: and other episodes at revisionistphistory dot com or on your
Speaker 1: favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Neo La Belle,
Speaker 1: Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Music is composed by Luis Gara and Taka Yazuzawa. Flon
Speaker 1: Williams is our engineer, fact checker Michelle Siraka. Thanks to
Speaker 1: the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 4: So I used to joke with Welt and God rest
Speaker 4: his soul. I got to know him well later in
Speaker 4: my life and said, you should have come to meet
Speaker 4: with the one. You had horrible technique. You know, I
Speaker 4: gotta help you