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):
Bushkin. The greatest game of basketball anyone has ever played
was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, March second, nineteen.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Sixty two, and everybody's thinking out on his work.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
God, I got he's got sixty nine gone at here's
the past.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
He's got another.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Cold, rainy night. Just over four thousand people in the stands.
Philadelphia Warriors versus.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
The New York Knicks have a good shot. They're taking it,
but mostly they're setting up the big man.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
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 Willed. 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, it was not like that. He was
(01:11):
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 March second,
Wilt was hungover. He'd been out all night with a
(01:32):
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 they were
only twenty four hours in a day and will only
live to the age of sixty three. But even the
skeptics were like, well, maybe it's ten thousand or eight thousand.
(01:53):
It was an argument over whether it was an unbelievably
high number or merely an incredibly high number.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
The big Man over the Warriors and the big man
in the he has ninety two points.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Jaron, make sure my.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Name is Malcolm Gladwell. 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.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Work's got the ball, he's gone up, he shoots, So.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Back to the game 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. He shoots
(03:00):
put it out the reason Luck and Bill.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
K so Rockwick in the chamber.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
A hundred points, 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 liney or
thirty two Ye. That's Rick Berry speaking. He was a
contemporary of Chamberlain's, also a Hall of Famer, an absolutely
(03:32):
unstoppable scorer. I met him at his condo 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 looked like he had
special extensions put on them, and that thing that great
athletes have and never seem to lose, which is that
(03:53):
they kind of glide across the floor like 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 Eyedea. He is
and why they have such difficulties spreading. But for the moment,
(04:14):
back to Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain next, He's 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
(04:35):
who could excel at virtually every physical feat under the sun,
who could score at will with 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
(05:00):
to shoot his foul shots underhanded. 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
(05:20):
an incredible free.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Throw shooter on the line.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Pal shot up in the area is eighty four. He
makes twenty eight 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
(05:44):
the greatest.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
I missed ten in one season and nine in another
and the whole season.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
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 Barry would miss
nine or ten.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
I think I shot ninety three five or something in
ninety four to seven, something like that.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
And Rick Berry only shot underhanded.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
From a physics standpoint, it's a much better way to shoot.
Less 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 hand This is not a
natural position when I shoot underhanded free throws. Where are
my arms hanging straight down the way they are normally?
(06:30):
And so I'm totally completely relaxed. It's not in the
situation where I have to worry about my muscles getting
tense or tight. And then the shot itself, it's a
softer shot. So many of my shots, even if they're
a little off, they hit so nice and soft, and
they'll still fall in the much softer touch, and so
you have a little bit more margin for error. Some
of those shots that are a little bit offline have
(06:52):
a much better opportunity of going into the basket than
when you shoot overhand.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So Wilt 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. Well, Chamberlain stops shooting underhanded,
and he goes back to being a terrible foul shooter.
(07:27):
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. This is not a trivial matter.
If you're a basketball player and you can't hit your
free throws, you're an incredible liability to your team, particularly
(07:48):
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 hit your foul shots, it
means you can't be used in a tight game. You
know what Chamberlain's coach said to him, if you were
a ninety percent shooter, we might never lose. You got
(08:09):
to know him quite well.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
I got to know him.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
You don't.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
I just joked with him. You said your technique was terrible.
I mean, but I mean had you stuck with it,
I mean, there's no tell him 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 the fallom.
Speaker 1 (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 open to taking foul 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.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
Oh, you actually talked to shit. I tried to get
Shack to change, and I try to get him done.
He said, forget, I'd rather shoot zero than shoot underhanded.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
And I'm just fascinated by that.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
I don't understand it.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
No, The difference is if Shaq 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 the game.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Guy.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Only George Johnson, my teammate with the Warriors, he was
I think he was like forty eight fifty percent 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 as much as I'd like it, But
I think eventually, a season or two later, I think
George actually shot eighty percent. I can actually look it
up and be interesting to see what he did. I'll
get George Johnson's stats here everything George Johnson's stats. Okay,
(10:03):
stats for George Johnson NBA are George.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Johnson's stats from the twenty fifteen NFL season.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
NFL wrong guy, wrong season, I mean, but anyway, we'll
look it up. It's interesting, I think.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
But what about your on your high school team?
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Did anyone follow Oh?
Speaker 4 (10:22):
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 had him shooting really well, and he never had
the nerve to go back and do it. You want
to talk his name, it's not it's fair to him.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
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 is a Nigerian American who plays for Louisville called
Chinanu Anuaku. The other is Kenyon Barry, who plays for
(11:01):
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, and two if they're an offspring of Rick Berry.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Anyway, do you want to just quickly describe where we
are and what we're doing.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
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. Maybe women are
more rational when they're on the court.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
So we are in Columbia's basketball gym and we are
going to compare overhand shooting to underhand shooting. Hey, here
he goes.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
That's er Talkov, a junior in the team. She missed
her first try.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I feel like you could bend in the kne a
little more on that that.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Then she makes the 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 Mead, senior
point guard.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
She calls 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
(12:41):
about Rick Berry 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 Granovetter.
Granavetter is one of the greatest social theorists of his generation.
If you're an academic groupie like I am, Granavetter is
(13:04):
like James Dean. So Granoveter 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
abiding citizens suddenly throw rocks through windows? Before Granavetter came along,
(13:25):
sociologists 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 Granavetter explaining that idea.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
There was a lot of intellectual tradition that said that
when people got into a crowd, their independent judgment went
out the window, and that they somehow became creatures of
the crowd, and that there was some kind of I
don't know, miasma 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
(14:10):
the mob mentality.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
But Granna 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.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Than that.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
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 in
that activates other people, and it all happens so fast.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Granaveetter 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 Granaveetter mean by that word threshold? A belief
is an internal thing. It's a position we've taken in
(14:56):
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. Granavedterer makes two crucial arguments. The first is
that thresholds and beliefs sometimes overlap, but a lot of
the time they don't. When your teenage son is driving
(15:19):
one 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
(15:39):
a really low threshold. It doesn't take a lot of
encouragement to get him to do something stupid. Granavetter'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.
(16:00):
But think about your grandmother. She might well need her sister,
her grandchildren, her neighbors, or 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. Granavetter's argument goes on in
(16:23):
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
Grandavetter's argument. What people believe isn't going to help you much.
If you want to understand why they try or don't
(16:43):
try difficult or problematic or strange things. You 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 grandmothers might throw rocks through windows. Granavetter's theory
explained a lot of things that have been puzzling to me.
(17:04):
So here's a good example. It's from an interview I
did at the ninety second Street Wall in New York
with the economist Richard Thaylor, 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
(17:25):
time we met was at a hotel bar in Rochester, Yes,
the only time I've ever Faylor is the 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.
(17:47):
Take the professional football draft. For those of you who
are 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 pick
the players they want one by one. The first player
taken as the one that people think will be the
best professional player. That person gets it's the biggest salary.
(18:10):
The second player 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 to try and acquire those high
(18:33):
draft picks.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
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
valuable than an early pick in the second round.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Picks if you compute the surplus a player provides to
his team, meaning how good his performance is minus how
much you have to 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
(19:28):
that pick. It's the biggest anomaly I've ever found.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
The implication of Taylor in Massey's work is that teams
should trade away their first round picks. They should stockpile
players in the second and 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 Kate Massey did their research,
(19:56):
they got a call from the Washington Redskins.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
It was early in Dan Snyder's tenure 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 Gad and me and
we told them what our findings were. And we basically
have two pieces of advice, trade down and lend picks
(20:25):
this year for picks next year.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
With that last sentence, Taylor is referring to the second
thing he and Massy 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 future year. And Taylor and Massy discover that the
(20:48):
rule of thumb makes no sense. It's completely irrational. It
massively overvalues current picks and undervalues future picks. Like a
good economist, Taylor talks about the value of that rule
of thumb as an interest rate. It's like borrowing money.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
If you compute the real interest rate, it's one hundred
and thirty seven percent per year.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
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 Stans guys what to do, and then we
watched the draft eagerly that year, and they traded up
and borrowed a picked this year for one next year.
(21:42):
So okay.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
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. Dyla and Massi have consulted
for three NFL franchises now and no one has ever
followed their advice. It gets worse. There's a very respected
economist named David Romer who famously proved that football teams
(22:04):
would win more games if they didn't punt, if they
simply use all four dens to try and gain ten
yards as opposed to giving the ball away to their opponents.
So since Romer published his work, are NFL teams less
likely to punt on fourth down? You guessed it?
Speaker 2 (22:22):
No to tell you how big this 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 often on fourth down another game and
a half. So, just being smart, we win at least
(22:44):
two games a year on average.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
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 they
have irrational beliefs. That was my first thought when I
was listening to Theodore talk about his football research. Those
dumb football owners. But that can't be right. You don't
(23:11):
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 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.
(23:32):
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,
a geeky, middle aged economist from the University of Chicago
with a bunch of equations that you need a PhD
to understand.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
There's some geek at every team who's read our paper.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Think of the Jonah Hill character in the movie Bunny Ball. Yeah, right,
and nobody pays attention to that guy.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Apparently there aren't a lot of radical in basketball either,
just the Berries and Shinano Ouaku, the Nigerian American who
plays for Louisville, And as it turns out, Mark granavetter.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
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 frees throwing. Oh really, yeah, yeah, I
could make almost every shot.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
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.
(24:56):
In his autobiography, 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
(25:20):
key things here. First, he writes, I know I was wrong,
just as Granavetta 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 described shooting underhanded as a granny shot. That's
what Chamberlain's talking about. He is the one who look foolish.
(25:43):
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 Barry'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, maybe seventy percent or so,
(26:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
A well, I can't do it. I mean, it's with
the girl. I said that. I always remember it, 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
you're making them. And the first game I remember where
I did it was on the road in scotch Plains,
(26:31):
New Jersey. I shot the free throw guy in the
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 and I was cool from that point forward, So
I didn't care anymore what they said. If I'm making
(26:53):
him that's all it really matters.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
What's interesting is that Barry actually has the same initial
reaction as Wilt 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 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
(27:17):
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, or the approval or the company
of otters to do what you think is right. Now
here's the catch. The person who thinks this way is
(27:38):
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 what a good guy he was.
But around the league they thought of him as the
most arrogant guy.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
Ever.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Half the players disliked Rick, the other half hated him.
Here's another quote. He lacks diplomacy. If they sent him
to the UN he'd ended up starting World War III.
Speaker 4 (28:08):
Yeah. I was about winning. I was about giving my
best effort, and I had a very difficult time accepting
the fact. I wouldn't accept the fact if a teammate
is not going to play his hardest.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
Watch a game, right, guy shoots free throw, misses it,
everybody goes up, slaps his hand. 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, disturb his concentration when he's supposed to be
focusing on shooting his free throws, and worry about having
to slap the hands of his teammates.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Do you hear what upsets him? The social part of
the game, players paying attention to each other's feelings as
opposed to their own performance.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
Plus the fact if he misses it, you should go
up and smack him in the head for 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.
Speaker 1 (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 write 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 incident 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
was 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
(30:27):
my own autobiography.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Yeah, I'd let people say what they wanted to I
didn't ask for editorial rights to be able to go
through and see what they said and see, oh no,
I don't want that in there. I let him say
what they wanted to say.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
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 spent an
afternoon with Burry at his condo, and I'd read all
(30:58):
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 Berry
stands for. It's perfectionism. And what is a perfectionist? Someone
(31:21):
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 know, we've
(31:42):
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
(32:02):
vegetable soup with an avocado salad, simple, nutritious. 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
(32:23):
was a sudden slowing of the traffic ahead, and I
breaked a moment too late. I saw his foot come
down in the passenger foot well, 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
(32:44):
scores and things people said as if it were yesterday.
I think he understands the price he's paid for being
the way he is. It kept coming up.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
He's not describing an easy life, but think of what
he gained. Rick Berry was the best basketball player he
could possibly have been, and Wilt Chamberlain could never.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Say that he's gone.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
He's trying to get up.
Speaker 4 (33:25):
It's almost incomprehensible to me that someone could have that
attitude to sacrifice their success over worrying about how somebody
feels about you, what it says about you. That's that's sad.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Really, you've been listening to revisionist history. Sometimes the past
deserves a second chance. If you like what you've heard,
(34:10):
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 revisionistphistory dot com or on your
favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Neo La Belle,
Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Music is composed by Luis Gara and Taka Yazuzawa. Flon
(34:34):
Williams is our engineer, fact checker Michelle Siraka. Thanks to
the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
So I used to joke with Welt and God rest
his soul. I got to know him well later in
my life and said, you should have come to meet
with the one. You had horrible technique. You know, I
gotta help you
Bushkin. The greatest game of basketball anyone has ever played
was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, March second, nineteen.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Sixty two, and everybody's thinking out on his work.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
God, I got he's got sixty nine gone at here's
the past.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
He's got another.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Cold, rainy night. Just over four thousand people in the stands.
Philadelphia Warriors versus.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
The New York Knicks have a good shot. They're taking it,
but mostly they're setting up the big man.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
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 Willed. 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, it was not like that. He was
(01:11):
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 March second,
Wilt was hungover. He'd been out all night with a
(01:32):
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 they were
only twenty four hours in a day and will only
live to the age of sixty three. But even the
skeptics were like, well, maybe it's ten thousand or eight thousand.
(01:53):
It was an argument over whether it was an unbelievably
high number or merely an incredibly high number.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
The big Man over the Warriors and the big man
in the he has ninety two points.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Jaron, make sure my.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Name is Malcolm Gladwell. 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.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Work's got the ball, he's gone up, he shoots, So.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Back to the game 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. He shoots
(03:00):
put it out the reason Luck and Bill.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
K so Rockwick in the chamber.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
A hundred points, 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 liney or
thirty two Ye. That's Rick Berry speaking. He was a
contemporary of Chamberlain's, also a Hall of Famer, an absolutely
(03:32):
unstoppable scorer. I met him at his condo 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 looked like he had
special extensions put on them, and that thing that great
athletes have and never seem to lose, which is that
(03:53):
they kind of glide across the floor like 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 Eyedea. He is
and why they have such difficulties spreading. But for the moment,
(04:14):
back to Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain next, He's 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
(04:35):
who could excel at virtually every physical feat under the sun,
who could score at will with 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
(05:00):
to shoot his foul shots underhanded. 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
(05:20):
an incredible free.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Throw shooter on the line.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Pal shot up in the area is eighty four. He
makes twenty eight 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
(05:44):
the greatest.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
I missed ten in one season and nine in another
and the whole season.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
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 Barry would miss
nine or ten.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
I think I shot ninety three five or something in
ninety four to seven, something like that.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
And Rick Berry only shot underhanded.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
From a physics standpoint, it's a much better way to shoot.
Less 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 hand This is not a
natural position when I shoot underhanded free throws. Where are
my arms hanging straight down the way they are normally?
(06:30):
And so I'm totally completely relaxed. It's not in the
situation where I have to worry about my muscles getting
tense or tight. And then the shot itself, it's a
softer shot. So many of my shots, even if they're
a little off, they hit so nice and soft, and
they'll still fall in the much softer touch, and so
you have a little bit more margin for error. Some
of those shots that are a little bit offline have
(06:52):
a much better opportunity of going into the basket than
when you shoot overhand.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So Wilt 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. Well, Chamberlain stops shooting underhanded,
and he goes back to being a terrible foul shooter.
(07:27):
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. This is not a trivial matter.
If you're a basketball player and you can't hit your
free throws, you're an incredible liability to your team, particularly
(07:48):
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 hit your foul shots, it
means you can't be used in a tight game. You
know what Chamberlain's coach said to him, if you were
a ninety percent shooter, we might never lose. You got
(08:09):
to know him quite well.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
I got to know him.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
You don't.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
I just joked with him. You said your technique was terrible.
I mean, but I mean had you stuck with it,
I mean, there's no tell him 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 the fallom.
Speaker 1 (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 open to taking foul 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.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
Oh, you actually talked to shit. I tried to get
Shack to change, and I try to get him done.
He said, forget, I'd rather shoot zero than shoot underhanded.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
And I'm just fascinated by that.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
I don't understand it.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
No, The difference is if Shaq 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 the game.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Guy.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Only George Johnson, my teammate with the Warriors, he was
I think he was like forty eight fifty percent 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 as much as I'd like it, But
I think eventually, a season or two later, I think
George actually shot eighty percent. I can actually look it
up and be interesting to see what he did. I'll
get George Johnson's stats here everything George Johnson's stats. Okay,
(10:03):
stats for George Johnson NBA are George.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Johnson's stats from the twenty fifteen NFL season.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
NFL wrong guy, wrong season, I mean, but anyway, we'll
look it up. It's interesting, I think.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
But what about your on your high school team?
Speaker 5 (10:21):
Did anyone follow Oh?
Speaker 4 (10:22):
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 had him shooting really well, and he never had
the nerve to go back and do it. You want
to talk his name, it's not it's fair to him.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
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 is a Nigerian American who plays for Louisville called
Chinanu Anuaku. The other is Kenyon Barry, who plays for
(11:01):
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, and two if they're an offspring of Rick Berry.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Anyway, do you want to just quickly describe where we
are and what we're doing.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
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. Maybe women are
more rational when they're on the court.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
So we are in Columbia's basketball gym and we are
going to compare overhand shooting to underhand shooting. Hey, here
he goes.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
That's er Talkov, a junior in the team. She missed
her first try.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I feel like you could bend in the kne a
little more on that that.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Then she makes the 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 Mead, senior
point guard.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
She calls 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
(12:41):
about Rick Berry 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 Granovetter.
Granavetter is one of the greatest social theorists of his generation.
If you're an academic groupie like I am, Granavetter is
(13:04):
like James Dean. So Granoveter 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
abiding citizens suddenly throw rocks through windows? Before Granavetter came along,
(13:25):
sociologists 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 Granavetter explaining that idea.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
There was a lot of intellectual tradition that said that
when people got into a crowd, their independent judgment went
out the window, and that they somehow became creatures of
the crowd, and that there was some kind of I
don't know, miasma 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
(14:10):
the mob mentality.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
But Granna 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.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Than that.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
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 in
that activates other people, and it all happens so fast.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Granaveetter 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 Granaveetter mean by that word threshold? A belief
is an internal thing. It's a position we've taken in
(14:56):
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. Granavedterer makes two crucial arguments. The first is
that thresholds and beliefs sometimes overlap, but a lot of
the time they don't. When your teenage son is driving
(15:19):
one 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
(15:39):
a really low threshold. It doesn't take a lot of
encouragement to get him to do something stupid. Granavetter'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.
(16:00):
But think about your grandmother. She might well need her sister,
her grandchildren, her neighbors, or 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. Granavetter's argument goes on in
(16:23):
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
Grandavetter's argument. What people believe isn't going to help you much.
If you want to understand why they try or don't
(16:43):
try difficult or problematic or strange things. You 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 grandmothers might throw rocks through windows. Granavetter's theory
explained a lot of things that have been puzzling to me.
(17:04):
So here's a good example. It's from an interview I
did at the ninety second Street Wall in New York
with the economist Richard Thaylor, 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
(17:25):
time we met was at a hotel bar in Rochester, Yes,
the only time I've ever Faylor is the 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.
(17:47):
Take the professional football draft. For those of you who
are 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 pick
the players they want one by one. The first player
taken as the one that people think will be the
best professional player. That person gets it's the biggest salary.
(18:10):
The second player 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 to try and acquire those high
(18:33):
draft picks.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
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
valuable than an early pick in the second round.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Picks if you compute the surplus a player provides to
his team, meaning how good his performance is minus how
much you have to 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
(19:28):
that pick. It's the biggest anomaly I've ever found.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
The implication of Taylor in Massey's work is that teams
should trade away their first round picks. They should stockpile
players in the second and 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 Kate Massey did their research,
(19:56):
they got a call from the Washington Redskins.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
It was early in Dan Snyder's tenure 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 Gad and me and
we told them what our findings were. And we basically
have two pieces of advice, trade down and lend picks
(20:25):
this year for picks next year.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
With that last sentence, Taylor is referring to the second
thing he and Massy 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 future year. And Taylor and Massy discover that the
(20:48):
rule of thumb makes no sense. It's completely irrational. It
massively overvalues current picks and undervalues future picks. Like a
good economist, Taylor talks about the value of that rule
of thumb as an interest rate. It's like borrowing money.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
If you compute the real interest rate, it's one hundred
and thirty seven percent per year.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
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 Stans guys what to do, and then we
watched the draft eagerly that year, and they traded up
and borrowed a picked this year for one next year.
(21:42):
So okay.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
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. Dyla and Massi have consulted
for three NFL franchises now and no one has ever
followed their advice. It gets worse. There's a very respected
economist named David Romer who famously proved that football teams
(22:04):
would win more games if they didn't punt, if they
simply use all four dens to try and gain ten
yards as opposed to giving the ball away to their opponents.
So since Romer published his work, are NFL teams less
likely to punt on fourth down? You guessed it?
Speaker 2 (22:22):
No to tell you how big this 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 often on fourth down another game and
a half. So, just being smart, we win at least
(22:44):
two games a year on average.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
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 they
have irrational beliefs. That was my first thought when I
was listening to Theodore talk about his football research. Those
dumb football owners. But that can't be right. You don't
(23:11):
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 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.
(23:32):
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,
a geeky, middle aged economist from the University of Chicago
with a bunch of equations that you need a PhD
to understand.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
There's some geek at every team who's read our paper.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Think of the Jonah Hill character in the movie Bunny Ball. Yeah, right,
and nobody pays attention to that guy.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Apparently there aren't a lot of radical in basketball either,
just the Berries and Shinano Ouaku, the Nigerian American who
plays for Louisville, And as it turns out, Mark granavetter.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
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 frees throwing. Oh really, yeah, yeah, I
could make almost every shot.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
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.
(24:56):
In his autobiography, 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
(25:20):
key things here. First, he writes, I know I was wrong,
just as Granavetta 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 described shooting underhanded as a granny shot. That's
what Chamberlain's talking about. He is the one who look foolish.
(25:43):
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 Barry'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, maybe seventy percent or so,
(26:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
A well, I can't do it. I mean, it's with
the girl. I said that. I always remember it, 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
you're making them. And the first game I remember where
I did it was on the road in scotch Plains,
(26:31):
New Jersey. I shot the free throw guy in the
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 and I was cool from that point forward, So
I didn't care anymore what they said. If I'm making
(26:53):
him that's all it really matters.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
What's interesting is that Barry actually has the same initial
reaction as Wilt 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 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
(27:17):
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, or the approval or the company
of otters to do what you think is right. Now
here's the catch. The person who thinks this way is
(27:38):
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 what a good guy he was.
But around the league they thought of him as the
most arrogant guy.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
Ever.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Half the players disliked Rick, the other half hated him.
Here's another quote. He lacks diplomacy. If they sent him
to the UN he'd ended up starting World War III.
Speaker 4 (28:08):
Yeah. I was about winning. I was about giving my
best effort, and I had a very difficult time accepting
the fact. I wouldn't accept the fact if a teammate
is not going to play his hardest.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
Watch a game, right, guy shoots free throw, misses it,
everybody goes up, slaps his hand. 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, disturb his concentration when he's supposed to be
focusing on shooting his free throws, and worry about having
to slap the hands of his teammates.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Do you hear what upsets him? The social part of
the game, players paying attention to each other's feelings as
opposed to their own performance.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
Plus the fact if he misses it, you should go
up and smack him in the head for 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.
Speaker 1 (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 write 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 incident 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
was 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
(30:27):
my own autobiography.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Yeah, I'd let people say what they wanted to I
didn't ask for editorial rights to be able to go
through and see what they said and see, oh no,
I don't want that in there. I let him say
what they wanted to say.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
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 spent an
afternoon with Burry at his condo, and I'd read all
(30:58):
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 Berry
stands for. It's perfectionism. And what is a perfectionist? Someone
(31:21):
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 know, we've
(31:42):
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
(32:02):
vegetable soup with an avocado salad, simple, nutritious. 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
(32:23):
was a sudden slowing of the traffic ahead, and I
breaked a moment too late. I saw his foot come
down in the passenger foot well, 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
(32:44):
scores and things people said as if it were yesterday.
I think he understands the price he's paid for being
the way he is. It kept coming up.
Speaker 4 (32:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
He's not describing an easy life, but think of what
he gained. Rick Berry was the best basketball player he
could possibly have been, and Wilt Chamberlain could never.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Say that he's gone.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
He's trying to get up.
Speaker 4 (33:25):
It's almost incomprehensible to me that someone could have that
attitude to sacrifice their success over worrying about how somebody
feels about you, what it says about you. That's that's sad.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Really, you've been listening to revisionist history. Sometimes the past
deserves a second chance. If you like what you've heard,
(34:10):
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 revisionistphistory dot com or on your
favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Neo La Belle,
Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Music is composed by Luis Gara and Taka Yazuzawa. Flon
(34:34):
Williams is our engineer, fact checker Michelle Siraka. Thanks to
the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
So I used to joke with Welt and God rest
his soul. I got to know him well later in
my life and said, you should have come to meet
with the one. You had horrible technique. You know, I
gotta help you
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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