Back in 2001, legendary football coach Steve Spurrier decided to leave the Florida Gators for the NFL. His players had no idea he’d be going, but Spurrier made sure he left them with his most valuable lesson, starting with a song: Leanne Womack’s “I hope you dance.” Spurrier had a simple message for a team under enormous pressure all season as a perennial national-title favorite: It’s a game. The weight of the world isn’t on your shoulders. Have fun. Go dance.
That story always reminds me that we don’t DO basketball, we PLAY it. Like dance, basketball is totally connected to movement, rhythm, and timing. In fact, one definition of dance includes the phrase “simply taking delight in movement itself.”
When I watch Chet Holmgren and Victor Wembanyama, I see joy and fervor. They’re dancing out there—and they’re doing it at a very young age. That’s the secret to their early success in this league.
Chet and Wemby clearly had people who told them to “feel the music” in their games. When they shot-fake, attack the second box, and hit a floater; when they put the ball through their legs, pass to someone, and make a quick give-and-go cut; when they dribble the ball in transition instead of robotically handing it to a guard—these are all examples, in basketball parlance, of dancing.
Most parents get their tall kids into basketball because they’re tall, and then most coaches try to turn those tall kids into cookie-cutter big men: Run to the rim. Don’t dribble. Get to the block. Be as big as possible. Protect the paint. Gain weight! These budding players are repeatedly told to do the same and then get yelled at when they don’t. That’s not fun!
But now, parents with tall kids are going to go down the block to the rec center or blacktop with their kids. They’re going to know that their kids—even the rail-thin ones—don’t have to become paint-bound bruisers.
Why? Because now there’s Chet and Wemby.
Learning to dance
As TrueHoopers know, I coached Dametri Hill when he was a 6-6 high school freshman who weighed about 300 pounds. Dametri had coaches throughout our county who wanted to keep him from dancing.
One said something that I’ll never forget: “I’d never let that big sonuvabitch leave the paint.”
I wanted Dametri to be a basketball player. When I coached our teams each summer, I made him play point guard some. My rationale was: “If he can see what it’s like to feed other guys in the post, it would help him understand how to be a better target.”
Then, during his sophomore year, at my request, Dametri tried playing football. With his incredible hands and nimble feet, I thought he’d make an incredible tight end. Our head coach, even after I told him he needed to make things fun for Big D, put him on the offensive line. I even suggested letting him play some fullback, just to get him to fall in love with a game he’d never played. Instead, they told him that he’d probably be one of the best lineman in the country—if he could just gain 25-to-30 pounds. After one spring practice, he asked me how good he’d be at basketball if he gained more weight. I told him he wouldn’t be as good. He agreed.
And that was that. He scored 2,392 points for us, from inside and outside; then started every game for Florida’s first-ever Final Four team; then led the SEC in scoring two seasons later. Despite playing center and getting one dunk in his four-year career, he was a three-year college starter and a longtime pro overseas. Could he have made the NFL? In my mind, without a doubt. But first, he needed to have fun. He needed to learn to dance.
Try falling in love with raking leaves or mowing lawns. We do those things because we have to. To plenty of very tall men I’ve met over the years, that’s what hoopin’ was to them: they played because they had to or felt guilty when they didn’t. It’s supposed to be fun, especially when you’re young. It’s a business now. The game is so hard. I often tell parents: “If you want them to stick with the sport when it gets really tough, they’d better fall in love with it.” Being elite requires countless hours of practicing, something most players love when it’s fun.
Chet and Victor, I bet, will tell different stories. Part of their success owes to how the game has changed into positionless basketball. They grew up playing a fun game in which they could dribble, pass, and shoot—not just run to the rim and get big. They’ve been allowed to play everywhere on the floor.
If you want to get a player better at defending in space, let him play with the ball in space. I had a player who made the All-G League First Team as a center one year and as a small forward the next. We trained for both positions for two straight summers. He told me that trying to beat people off the dribble made him a better on-ball defender.
At the time, I was focused on getting big guys more comfortable guarding people in space, changing speed and direction, changing angles to cut off lanes to the rim, chasing guys down, etc. Yet, this player also told me something I hadn’t considered: “I’m finding myself reading the game better defensively on the ball because I can tell people are setting me up the way I’d be setting them up with my dribble. Before I was just trying to mirror what they were doing; now I can think like them. When they’re giving me a slow right-hand dribble, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, he’s gonna hit me with a hesi or go hesi-cross.”
You realize everyone is in on the act, right? He’s loved by basically everyone associated with the NBA not named Stephen Jackson, and that goes for the media as well. They know the deal and work extra to get an honest answer out of him, and in this case “I don’t know” was probably pretty damn honest. When the cameras are on Pop plays cranky old man. When they’re off he’s, by all accounts from those who have spent time with him over the last three decades, as supportive, personable, engaging, and as real as it gets.