Literature provides fertile ground for sport. Hemingway penned The Old Man and the Sea, an epic man versus nature challenge. Daniel Brown wrote The Boys in the Boat, a tapestry of sport and society culminating in the 1936 Olympics.
And Arthur Conan Doyle shared the dry wit and wisdom of Sherlock Holmes. How can Holmes inform basketball and coaching?
"Elementary, my dear Watson," never appears word-for-word from Holmes.
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." (The Sign of Four)The impossible happens with surprising regularity in basketball. 16 seeds beat ones. UMBC defeating Virginia and the Harvard Crimson women beating Stanford in Palo Alto. And UCLA upset by Ivy League upstart Princeton.
A future ER doctor scored the winning hoop.
"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact." (The Boscombe Valley Mystery)
A most frustrating truth happens upon hearing, "Well, everyone knows that" or players say after an egregious mistake, "I know, I know." Learning from others' mistakes makes painless progress.
"I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty." (The Sign of Four)
Preparation precedes high performance. Process is king. And evaluating a team without seeing their practices writes an incomplete story.
"Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay." (A Study in Scarlet)
Video is the truth machine. Analytics are the necessary fuel for objective measure of scoring creation and prevention. Ignoring either ignores the coaching imperative of putting the team in the best position to succeed.
"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere." (The Sign of Four)
Popovich challenged players to "figure it out." Sports coaching and playing is about solving problems in real-time. Winning is valued because it is hard.
"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important." (A Case of Identity)
Attention to detail never goes out of style. Detail comes in the 'macro' strategy and the micro, execution at the decision-execution scoring moment.
"Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last." (The Red Circle)
Continuing education and training are the hallmark of excellence. The greats of the game and permanent students.
"Excellent!" I cried. "Elementary," said he. (The Adventure of the Crooked Man)
Achieving simple is never easy. Dedication to the fundamentals marks great careers like those of Kobe Bryant and Bill Walton, of whom Wooden said that he never tired of practicing footwork.
