Desperation

The Rulebook

There was a time when the Ball we cheer for today was prohibited as outside some platonic ideal. See Glory Road for a worthwhile, Disney telling of that era. Racists longing for the game to stay in the style of Bob Cousy (j/k — Cousy was a G) went so far as to outlaw dunking in the NCAA from 1967 to 1976:

[IMAGE: 1966 Texas Western Miners accepting the championship trophy — the first all-Black starting five to win an NCAA title, defeating Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky 72-65. The establishment saw this and panicked. The dunk ban followed the next year. Source: Wikimedia Commons]

"Many people have attributed this to the dominance of the then-college phenomenon Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar); the no-dunking rule is sometimes referred to as the 'Lew Alcindor rule.'"

Read that again. They couldn't outplay the revolution, so they rewrote the rulebook. Nobody said "Black players can't play." They said "nobody can dunk" — a rule universal on paper, surgical in practice.

Marcuse called this repressive tolerance: systems of power maintain themselves by defining the boundaries of acceptable play so narrowly that any deviation can be labeled illegitimate, while the system itself gets to look neutral.

The NCAA didn't deploy mobs. They deployed a rule change. That's the weaponization of procedural legitimacy — laundering suppression through institutional process so it looks like governance. Thiel warns that the fatal temptation is to define your market so narrowly you dominate by definition. The NCAA did exactly that — except from above: they redefined the game itself so the style beating them was no longer legal. Same structural lie, uglier motive.

Black players, long segregated from gyms, did play street ball. When someone loves something, they follow that love to wherever it can breathe.

[IMAGE: Rucker Park, Harlem — 155th and Frederick Douglass Blvd. Founded in 1956, it became the proving ground where the game the NCAA tried to suppress found its home. Wilt Chamberlain first played here in 1957. Dr. J built his legend on this blacktop before arenas ever knew his name. Source: Wikimedia Commons]

The traditional gym didn't just reject a different style — it admonished it because that style was usurping tradition's power. And when admonishment failed, they wrote new rules.

MLK put it best:

"History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals."

The Instinct Finds New Venues

Just as talented Black players shattered the old paradigm, those in power employed every tactic to retain it. Ultimately, skill overcame small-mindedness — the ban was repealed in 1976, and the game became what we cheer for today. But the instinct didn't die with the rule change. It just found new venues.

Malcolm Gladwell — New Yorker staff writer, author of Outliers, Blink, and the book that threads through much of this essay, David and Goliath — recounts Vivek Ranadivé, a software executive born in Mumbai who moved to Silicon Valley, found success and west-coast sun, and watched his twelve-year-old daughter Anjali play the odd sport called basketball. Accustomed to soccer, he refused to concede half the court. He conditioned his less traditionally-talented girls to full-court press the entire game — all ninety-four feet, every possession. They forced turnovers under their own basket and shot layups — no long-range skill required.

What followed was heartwarming, informative, and unfortunate:

• Heartwarming because he taught young women that grit can overcome — that "advantages" are not fixed.
• Informative because the opponents wouldn't press back. All they had to do was mirror the tactic, and his girls would have crumbled.
• Unfortunate because opposing coaches and parents reached into our racial playbook: "That's not how you're supposed to play… if you lived here you would know that."

When you innovate — when you play the game in a way the establishment didn't sanction — you break tradition. Breaking tradition ruffles complacent feathers. As an assistant coach put it: "You have to be outside the establishment to have the audacity to play that way."

On Gladwell's podcast, he investigates why more players don't shoot underhand. My synopsis won't do it justice. The finding: players accept a lower free-throw percentage because they're scared of what teammates, fans, and mostly strangers will think. Grown men paid to perform choose aesthetics over results.

Sweat Equity

Growing up, I didn't have a father figure. My dad went out for milk and apparently is still raising the cow. To no fault of my lovely Mother, she's an atrocious athlete and doesn't innately inspire athletic greatness. My style comes from a decision to lean on effort in place of ability. Over time, the two aren't mutually exclusive — consistent practice breeds ability. But the key to the court was leaving more of myself on it than everyone else.

When I was young, a childhood stranger — an opposing player from another school at the same basketball camp — watched this kid dive for every ball, leave sweat marks painted up and down the court, and have a change of clothes for halftime (sadly, not an exaggeration). Each summer I won the hustle award or most-improved. My overactive sweat glands and rotund stature probably helped — people's biases do favor "helping out" what looks like an underdog.

Years later, that stranger had become a good friend. He admitted: "I would sit there and think, he's getting this because he's fat." After trusting me and playing with me, he lamented it as petty jealousy: "The truth is, once everyone gets to know you, they know you're the hardest working som' bitch, period." I appreciate the sentiment and I'm not. Momma D may be.

Gladwell captures it: there are "a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that has to do with the absence of material resources." I lacked an athletic role model. I discovered early that coaches liked kids who worked hard; kids didn't. Most didn't find sliding on the ground cool. So I learned to be uncomfortable redefining disadvantages into advantages — which rattled the more finesse-focused players like Crank (comes full circle on his ass). To succeed, I had to choose to give up choice.

Seems simple. It's so much harder in practice.

The same instinct that made me dive for every ball — proving I belonged through sheer output — followed me off the court. And off the court, it got more complicated.

The Premise

I don't always apply that logic uniformly. The CORO Fellowship in Public Affairs — a post-graduate program I did after college — was one of the most transformative periods of my life, full stop. It's also difficult to explain in a bite-sized setting. When I couldn't capture its essence effectively, I'd let other people's assumptions fill the gap: "So you got a master's? Okay, cool."

I did this for a number of reasons. Convenience. Not knowing what I really wanted to convey. And ego — "Oh, this person doesn't understand, and I didn't get a master's… maybe I should just let them think I did." Why? Because I'm fallible and want to project confidence just like everyone else.

This shortcoming — very similar to how people embellish military service — is best captured by the fundamental attribution error. The clearest illustration is the question-contestant paradigm:

One person constructs quiz questions from their own knowledge. Another person answers them and gets 3 of 10 correct. Observers assume the questioner must be more knowledgeable — disregarding the unfair advantage baked into the setup.

Why do we assume the answerer is dumb? Because we take 3 out of 10 as failing, and failures suck, and the fat kid sweats a lot and gets the trophy as a reward for eating fast food. Step back and the whole thing is BS. One person draws on their knowledge to test someone who hasn't studied a thing. Three is actually pretty impressive. Einstein put it better: "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Relativity

In the Army, myself and others suffer from this constantly. We're consumed by the immediacy of our environment, which leads us to relativize, compare, and assign value based on a singular snapshot:

• "I shot expert and you shot a 12…" (marksmanship is hard)
• "I'm Ranger qualified and you're not…" (shoutout to those kids who are really, really cold right now)
• "I've been deployed and you haven't."

Relativity can consume you. Given the right construal, someone is always worse off or always better. CT Fletcher's mom used to say something like that, to which he replied: "Nuh-uh, Momma. Somebody's gotta be the baddest. And that's me." (With biceps like that — sure, sounds good, CT.)

Broaden the scope and you see the absurdity of the question-contestant paradigm everywhere: okay, you're a better shooter than me during that iteration. What about the next? What about our personal lives, our fitness, our happiness?

My ego leads me to project shortcomings where there are none. To create problems from other people's assumptions. To get trapped by the acuteness of the situation.

I don't have to accept the premise. I can reject it.

Rejecting it is one thing. Playing like you mean it is another.

David's Rules

[IMAGE: Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1610). Not Michelangelo's heroic marble. This David looks unsettled, almost sad — holding a severed head that is Caravaggio's own self-portrait. The Latin inscription on the sword reads humilitas occidit superbiam: humility kills pride. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Gladwell argues — and persuades me — that David was not an underdog. In a footnote, Moshe Dayan explains: "David's greatness consisted in knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger." Writing in the 1800s, Maurice de Saxe upsets our obsession with biceps: "The art of war is about legs, not arms."

Gladwell's most lasting impression on me is his most straightforward. If we know our assumptions and biases lead us astray, why don't we full-court press, shoot underhand, dive for the ball, take the time to explain Ranger School and CORO?

Because "underdog" strategies are really damn hard. They require us to give our skin over to the cause. They require us to choose to give up choice.

Gladwell, without obscenities or banalities:

"To play by David's rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough… But Ranadivé? Oh, he was desperate."

How can we harness that audacity and rogue flair while still within the establishment?

How do we play desperately when we have enough skill to be persuaded by convenience and complacency not to?

Don't mistake what's before you as the task at hand. You must train for the future today. What exactly that looks like is beyond me. All I know is Alice had it right:

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Do more than you think is necessary. The best don't train given their present assumptions — they constantly create new scenarios that ask more of them so they don't succumb to complacency.

Do shit until you can't get it wrong.

Don't let past success pacify future pursuits of progress.

Nobody cares but you.

How desperate are you?

📷 Images to Add

Download each and drag into the essay. Delete this section when done.

1. Texas Western 1966 Championship Team → Drop before the Alcindor blockquote (replace the [IMAGE] placeholder in The Rulebook)
• Wikimedia Commons — public domain
• Caption: The 1966 Texas Western Miners — first all-Black starting five to win an NCAA title, defeating Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky 72-65. The dunk ban followed the next year.
2. Rucker Park, Harlem → Drop after "wherever it can breathe" (replace the [IMAGE] placeholder in The Rulebook)
• Wikimedia Commons
• Caption: Rucker Park, 155th and Frederick Douglass Blvd. Founded 1956. Wilt Chamberlain first played here in 1957. Dr. J built his legend on this blacktop before arenas ever knew his name.
3. Rick Barry Underhand Free Throw (~1975, Golden State Warriors) → Drop after "Grown men paid to perform choose aesthetics over results" at the end of The Instinct Finds New Venues
• Best source: NBA.com archival clip — screenshot or find the AP photo via Google Images (search "Rick Barry underhand free throw Warriors 1975")
• Caption: Rick Barry, Golden State Warriors. Career 90% from the line — shooting underhand. No one copied him. They'd rather miss.
4. Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1610) → Drop at the top of David's Rules (replace the [IMAGE] placeholder)
• Wikimedia Commons — public domain
• Caption: Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1610). Goliath's face is Caravaggio's self-portrait. The sword reads humilitas occidit superbiam: humility kills pride. Galleria Borghese, Rome.