The gift

Read this yesterday for the first time. It’s what the Duke Basketball Report wrote after last week’s game at Cameron:

Here’s something to kick around: the more talented you are, the less likely you are to be a great basketball player. The catch, of course, is how you define great.

If greatness is defined by physical ability, then the argument is moot. But if you look at basketball as a series of adaptations to physical challenges, then the less talented player has to make more adaptations to continue competing at a higher level than does the more talented player.

You could argue this case with Bill Russell vs. Wilt Chamberlain, Reggie Miller vs. Michael Jordan, or with Larry Bird or Magic Johnson vs. any number of their contemporaries.

You could, one supposes, start to make that argument about Davidson’s Stephen Curry.

Interesting. It made me think about something I read last summer when I was up in Davidson. Pat Jordan on Tom Seaver in his anthology:

The point is I could bring it faster than Tom. I always could. In Little League. In high school. Tom never had the luxury of my blinding talent in his youth. ‘I never threw hard then,’ he says. ‘I was aware of my physical limitations at fourteen. I had to adjust.’

Pitching became for Tom, at fourteen, not a physical activity, but a mental one. He learned how it felt to be shelled unmercifully one inning and then have to walk out to the mound to begin the next. ‘It’s a terrible feeling,’ he says. ‘You want to quit. You feel it’s hopeless. You have to force yourself to start again. Some guys can’t do that. They’re always fighting things beyond their control.’

Tom Seaver learned, earlier than most, to deal solely within the framework of his limitations. To circumvent those limitations. Unlike me, I raged against my limitations, and in the process, my very real talent suffered.

Which made me think of Stephen.

Lots of people have tried to identify the reasons for his immense appeal -- reasons, obviously, that go beyond points scored.

How he looks is on that list.

If he can do that, well, maybe I can do …

But what I like about this idea here is that it at least starts to demystify. It doesn’t stop at the notion of some nature-and-nurture tonic that makes Stephen able in some extra-special way to do what he does. No.

The suggestion here is that perhaps a gift can be what’s not there.

That it’s up to us how we choose to respond.

‘We got lucky’

Bought Jason King’s Kansas book last week and it showed up in yesterday’s mail.

Some Davidson-related items:

Russell Robinson: “We were lucky to survive against Davidson. But the way I saw it … I’d been watching UCLA play all year. They’d dodged some bullets and then played well after that. So we dodged ours against Davidson.”

Jeremy Case: “We’d made it to the Final Four, so the pressure was off and we could just go out and play.

“I think the bigger thing for Coach Self -- at least as far as stress -- was beating Davidson the week before and advancing to the Final Four. He got pretty emotional after that win. It was a side of him we weren’t used to seeing. The first round eliminations, the losses in the Elite Eight … all the struggles that we went through to get to the Final Four came down on him at once. His voice was cracking and his eyes were glazed over. It was a special moment.

“We all felt the tension that game. I talked to Russell and he was like, ‘Man, I couldn’t breathe out there.’ We were so nervous and so tight. It was understandable. We were one game away from the Final Four. The media and the hype had worn on us. Plus, Davidson was a really good team.”

Joe Posnanski: “The moment that will always stick with me from this remarkable Kansas team happened in Detroit, just after Kansas edged Davidson to go to the Final Four. The last strands of confetti were still falling, and coach Bill Self was being dragged from interview to interview while fans yelled, ‘Way to go, Coach!’ Self looked absolutely dazed.

“‘We got lucky,’ he told one coach, John Thompson, on his radio show, then he went across to the Kansas radio broadcast and said, ‘We got lucky,’ then he saw some fans from Lawrence that he knew, and he mouthed, ‘We got lucky.’

“They had gotten lucky, of course. The Jayhawks had not looked like themselves all game. They played scared, and anyone could understand. Davidson was this tournament’s charmed team, led by the nation’s charmed player, Stephen Curry. It was like shooting baskets against karma.”