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I don't often read sports biographies. I find them mostly Teflon and phony.
I made an exception recently, however, for a book by Jay Williams, former Duke basketball star and the Chicago Bulls first round pick (number two overall) in the 2002 NBA draft. Williams drove his motorcycle into a pole destroying his body and his career after his rookie season.
I'd heard him interviewed on the radio and thought his book sounded different. More truth than hype. I think it was.
The book, Jay Williams: Life is not an Accident, A Memoir of Reinvention, is about many things.
Williams gives a peak into the sordid and shudder inducing underbelly of youth sports. But mostly he discusses the profound misjudgment he made on the motorcycle and many more mistakes he made afterward. It's about his arduous, painful and frustrating physical rehab, his addiction to OxyContin, his toying with suicide, strife with his parents and his fiancé and ultimately his comeback in life and as a broadcaster for ESPN.
Included, of course, is his one year stint with the Bulls. It's there I'd like to focus:
The Bulls had last won a championship in 1998 after which Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Coach Phil Jackson and most of the rest of the gang were scattered to the winds and the organization spiraled downward.
They became an awful team.
In 2002 Bill Cartwright, who played on the first three Bulls championship teams of the early 90s and was an assistant for five years, was in his second year as head coach.
When Jay Williams was drafted he stepped into a losing dysfunctional culture of which Cartwright seemed powerless to change.
As an example, Williams details an exchange Cartwright had with Jalen Rose, one if his better players. During a timeout, Cartwright was drawing up a play, when Rose pointed at the board and said "We're not running that."
Instead of Bill Cartwright showing the type of strong leadership needed at that moment by putting Rose in his place he instead cowered to Rose and asked him what he wanted to run.
The exchange made Williams shake his head.
The idiots were running the asylum. The tail was wagging the dog. Guys were smoking dope before games, sending managers into the stands to get the "digits" of hot girls.
The dysfunction, of course, made it to the floor. This straight from Williams' book:
"On a bad team, players are always checking their statistics," he wrote. "And the selfishness that follows from that can affect everything that happens on the court. We were all guilty of trying to sabotage one another. After it happened a bunch of times to me, I'd had enough, and decided to take part in the charade.
"I wasn't going to be the only one to have his stats take a hit. So if I had the ball with four seconds or less to shoot, I'd defer to someone else, forcing them to heave up a contested, low percentage shot instead of it falling on my shoulders. If that teammate wound up with the ball in his hands with no time left on the shot clock, then he'd be charged with a turnover. Neither scenario looked good on the stat sheet, and I got away clean. It was a good old-fashioned game of hot potato.
"And I developed a masterful counter move for when a teammate tried to sabotage me: I'd just let the pass go out of bounds, transferring the turnover back to the passer."
Paying customers were going to these games!
Jay Williams well describes a culture of losers. Where there is no clearly enunciated and pursued team objective it's every man for himself.
Losers have a loser's mentality. The carping, divisiveness, sabotage and the undermining, all to serve self with what's best for self at that moment.
So what comes first, many ask. Is the divisive culture the product of losing, or is losing the product of a divisive culture?
Be assured, the formula for success for any team, department or organization is always the same: leadership first, team culture second, winning third.
If you don't follow that formula, as with the 2002 Bulls, you end up with a result that very much looks like a motorcycle wrapped around a pole.
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