David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants Read online

  He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”

  The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison: “One, two, three, attitude!”

  The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

  “One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had, I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not one, two, three, attitude. It’s one, two, three, attitude, hah!’”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

  4.

  In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J—one of the greatest athletes ever to play the game of basketball. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, on the other hand, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of practice and was out, which meant that their tallest player was six foot five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was only six foot two. But from the opening buzzer, the Rams launched a full-court press, and they never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won 87–79.

  In the world of basketball, there are countless stories like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. What did Digger Phelps do the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. And the UMass coach, Jack Leaman, who was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids—did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not. Many people in the world of basketball don’t really believe in the press because it’s not perfect: it can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers. Even Ranadivé readily admitted as much. All an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back. The girls were not good enough to handle a taste of their own medicine. But all those objections miss the point. If Ranadivé’s girls or Fordham’s scrappy overachievers had played the conventional way, they would have lost by thirty points. The press was the best chance the underdog had of beating Goliath. Logically, every team that comes in as an underdog should play that way, shouldn’t they? So why don’t they?

  Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time, underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the 202 lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe-to-toe with Goliath the conventional way 152 times—and lost 119 times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures is endless. In the 1940s, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedeviled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in Violent Politics, a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

  It makes no sense, unless you think back to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through snake-infested desert on the back of camels. It is easier and far more satisfying to retreat and compose yourself after every score—and execute perfectly choreographed plays—than to swarm about, arms flailing, and contest every inch of the basketball court. Underdog strategies are hard.

  The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that famous game between Fordham and the University of Massachusetts was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, more than four decades later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”

  Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and he used the press to take the school to its first NCAA tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. Again and again, in his career, Pitino has achieved extraordinary things with a fraction of the talent of his competitors.

  “I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. He is now the head basketball coach at the University of Louisville, and Louisville has become the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if their players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight percent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instructions—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who come to Louisville sit in the stands and watch that ceaseless activity and despair. 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. You would think, looking at his girls, that their complete inability to pass and dribble and shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible.

  5.

  One of the things that happened to Redwood City the minute the team started winning basketball games was that opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of youth basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Ranadivé’s girls, they felt, were not really playing basketball. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press, a twelve-year-old girl learned much more valuable lessons—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side
of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.

  “There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”

  Roger Craig said that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs, ‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”

  “One time, we were playing this team from East San Jose,” Ranadivé said. “They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age, the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head. You should never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw the guy out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”

  All the qualities that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and finely calibrated execution. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable: a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out-of-bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.

  T. E. Lawrence could triumph because he was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from the top English military academy. He was an archaeologist by trade who wrote dreamy prose. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. He didn’t care what people in the military establishment thought about his “untrained rabble” because he had little invested in the military establishment. And then there’s David. He must have known that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. But he was a shepherd, which in ancient times was one of the lowliest of all professions. He had no stake in the finer points of military ritual.

  We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options. Vivek Ranadivé stood on the sidelines as the opposing teams’ parents and coaches heaped abuse on him. Most people would have shrunk in the face of that kind of criticism. Not Ranadivé. It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before. Why should he care what the world of basketball thought of him? Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.

  6.

  At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six to beat the traffic. It went downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “one, two, three, attitude, hah!” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.

  “They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.

  “My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”

  “People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”

  “A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.

  “One girl fouled out.”

  “We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But…”

  Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. The Redwood City girls did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and in the end they lost—but not before proving that Goliath is not quite the giant he thinks he is.

  1 Roger Craig, it should be said, is more than simply a former professional athlete. Retired now, he was one of the greatest running backs in the history of the National Football League.

  Chapter Two

  Teresa DeBrito

  “My largest class was twenty-nine kids. Oh, it was fun.”

  1.

  When Shepaug Valley Middle School was built, to serve the children of the baby boom, three hundred students spilled out of school buses every morning. The building had a line of double doors at the entrance to handle the crush, and the corridors inside seemed as busy as a highway.

  But that was long ago. The baby boom came and went. The bucolic corner of Connecticut where Shepaug is located—with its charming Colonial-era villages and winding country lanes—was discovered by wealthy couples from New York City. Real-estate prices rose. Younger families could no longer afford to live in the area. Enrollment dropped to 245 students, then to just over 200. There are now eighty children in the school’s sixth grade. Based on the number of students coming up through the region’s elementary schools, that number may soon be cut in half, which means that the average class size in the school will soon fall well below the national average. A once-crowded school has become an intimate one.

  Would you send your child to Shepaug Valley Middle School?

  2.

  The story of Vivek Ranadivé and the Redwood City girls’ basketball team suggests that what we think of as an advantage and as a disadvantage is not always correct, that we mix the categories up. In this chapter and the next, I want to apply that idea to two seemingly simple questions about education. I say “seemingly” because they seem simple—although, as we will discover, they are really anything but.

  The Shepaug Valley Middle School question is the first of the two simple questions. My guess is that you’d be delighted to have your child in one of those intimate classrooms. Virtually everywhere in the world, parents and policymakers take it for granted that smaller classes are better classes. In the past few years, the governments of the United States, Britain, Holland, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and China—to name just a few—have all taken major steps to reduce the size of their classes. When the governor of California announced sweeping plans to reduce the size of his state’s classes, his popularity doubled within three weeks. Inside of a month, twenty other governors had announced plans to follow suit, and within a month and a half, the White House announced class-size reduction plans of its own. To this day, 77 percent of Americans think that it makes more sense to use taxpayer money to lower class sizes than to raise teachers’ salaries. Do you know how few things 77 percent of Americans agree on?

  There used to be as many as twenty-five students in a classroom at Shepaug Valley. Now that number is sometimes as low as fifteen. That means students at Shepaug get far more individual attention from their teacher than before, and common sense says that the more attention children get from their teacher, the better their learning experience will be. Students at the new, intimate Shepaug Valley ought to be doing better at school than students at the old crowded Shepaug—right?

  It turns out that there is a very elegant way to test whether this is true. Connecticut has a lot of schools like Shepaug. It’s a state with many small towns with small elementary schools, and small schools in small towns are s
ubject to the natural ebbs and flows of birthrates and real-estate prices—which means that a grade can be all but empty one year and crowded the next. Here are the enrollment records, for example, for the fifth grade in another Connecticut middle school:

  1993 18

  1994 11

  1995 17

  1996 14

  1997 13

  1998 16

  1999 15

  2000 21

  2001 23

  2002 10

  2003 18

  2004 21

  2005 18

  In 2001, there were twenty-three fifth graders. The next year there were ten! Between 2001 and 2002, everything else in that school remained the same. It had the same teachers, the same principal, the same textbooks. It was in the same building in the same town. The local economy and the local population were virtually identical. The only thing that changed was the number of students in fifth grade. If the students in the year with a larger enrollment did better than the students in the year with a smaller one, then we can be pretty sure that it was because of the size of the class, right?

  This is what is called a “natural experiment.” Sometimes scientists set up formal experiments to try and test hypotheses. But on rare occasions the real world provides a natural way of testing the same theory—and natural experiments have many advantages over formal experiments. So what happens if you use the natural experiment of Connecticut—and compare the year-to-year results of every child who happens to have been in a small class with the results of those who happened to have come along in years with lots of kids? The economist Caroline Hoxby has done just that, looking at every elementary school in the state of Connecticut, and here’s what she found: Nothing! “There are many studies that say they can’t find a statistically significant effect of some policy change,” Hoxby says. “That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an effect. It just means that they couldn’t find it in the data. In this study, I found estimates that are very precisely estimated around the point zero. I got a precise zero. In other words, there is no effect.”