How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life by Bob Rotella

Author:Bob Rotella
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-05-04T14:00:00+00:00

10.

Evaluating Yourself

I’VE LEARNED a lot about the minds of champions by watching the way John Calipari evaluates, pumps up, and criticizes his basketball players at the University of Kentucky. He often does things exactly in the opposite way from what most people would expect—and do to themselves.

Early in the 2011–12 season—the year Kentucky won its first national championship under John’s leadership—I was invited to go to Lexington to see the Wildcats play St. John’s, a perennially good team from the Big East. It happens that Rob McNamara, the head pro at Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville and a good friend, is a Kentucky native and a big fan of the basketball team. So I took Rob with me. We sat behind the Kentucky bench, and it was a party from start to finish. Kentucky dominated, getting ahead at one stage by thirty-five points. The final score had Kentucky up by twenty-five. The big crowd in Rupp Arena loved it and showed their love from the opening tip to the final buzzer.

Rob and I went down to the Kentucky locker room. Cal was away in a separate room doing a postgame radio interview. The players were celebrating. And why not? They were young and they’d just thrashed a big-name team.

Cal came into the team room, saw the celebration, and got angry. He told them to quiet down, and then he laid into them. I looked at the players’ faces. They were shocked. So was Rob. He looked at me as if to ask, “What’s going on?” I put a finger to my lips. We listened.

“Guys, how can you be in here celebrating?” Cal said. “I have been talking to you every day in practice about playing hard. Banging the boards. Diving on loose balls. I’ve been telling you we have to do those things for forty minutes every night. That is our goal.”

His voice grew even sterner. “I have not mentioned winning or losing once all year. I would rather lose the game and have you guys play hard at both ends for forty minutes than win and have you guys start celebrating with eight minutes to go. For thirty-two minutes, you guys played fantastic basketball. You did everything we’ve been practicing. And then you just totally lost focus. Guys, we’re not going to become the team we can become if we don’t do it for forty minutes every night. Thirty-two minutes isn’t good enough at Kentucky. If it’s good enough for you right now, you’re going to have to change, because it’s not good enough for me. I want you to understand this loud and clear. You better get it.”

Cal turned and walked out of the locker room.

“If I ever did that with my pro shop staff, they’d kill me,” Rob whispered.

“Well, this isn’t your pro shop staff. This is Kentucky. They’re trying to be the best of the best,” I said.

People who are trying to be the best get used to tough evaluations. They get used to high standards. Sometimes the evaluations come from coaches like Cal.

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