Nothing But Iron: It is (Being) Written by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. March 3, 2009 As a matter of routine now, I have neglected your sports reading needs for much of a basketball season. It will likely get worse because I have started writing a book about coaching basketball. You are waiting for the NBI Laboratories punch line, right? Well there isn’t one; I really am writing a book. As proof I provide the following excerpt: We coaches yell all kinds of things from the bench. Occasionally, but far less often than we believe, we deliver useful messages. Even less often players actually hear well enough to apply the information without distraction before the next pertinent action occurs. Let’s examine a common coaching phrase that is at least as beneficial as a backwards-worn athletic supporter: Use your head! I am proud to say that if I had a nickel for every time I said that, I would not have any nickels, for it may be the most pointless utterance in the dictionary of pointless coaching utterances. The literal interpretation of use your head would be for the player to actually use his head. I have seen such an example in games of H-O-R-S-E, where the player bounces of the ball off of his forehead like a soccer player might in an attempt to cause it to enter the goal. If successful, this is a difficult shot to duplicate, which is probably why it is rarely used in actual basketball games. The equally inane translation is this: Do not do the thing you just did. To which one can almost always attach the suffix: or you will be on the bench, with the unspoken qualifier, unless you are otherwise indispensable, in which case we will allow for occasional mistakes in exchange for your expected on-court greatness. But really, is it necessary to tell a player he made a mistake or that mistakes are undesirable? Does he not know that already? Maybe the early grade school player, before he understands the rules of basketball, is oblivious to his errors, but after that, he knows by the simple reminder of the official’s signal that he goofed. Similarly, without prompting, he already desires to avoid a repeat transgression because it compromises the mission of the team and, too often, ignites the disapproval of the coach. The effective coach, instead of berating and humiliating, focuses his efforts on teaching. He or she understands that off-balance shots will be taken, feet will shuffle and passes will miss their targets. Instead of yelling Use your head!, a coach might use his own, and offer constructive advice. He might, for example, say, "If you fake first or look him off, the defender is less likely to anticipate the pass." Or he might make it a team objective: "Come hard to the ball when the pass it thrown," or "give the passer a target hand away from the defender," or "let’s go back door when they overplay." That wasn’t actually an excerpt, because the passage, before this moment was not yet in the book, because I had not yet written it. In other words you are witness to the birth of a passage of my book. The good news is that much of my book is already written. For years I have collected stories, notes, ideas, methods, strategies from my failures, successes, triumphs and embarrassments as a coach. Some I have shared with you in past issues of NBI. You may see them again, at least if you are willing to shell out a cool $12.95 or whatever price covers the maintenance of my new authoring yacht. There is some content to add and refine, but most of what remains is the painstaking task of organization, editing and reorganization, and–yuck–proofreading. You might wonder what credentials make me an authority on the subject. Me too, but for starters, I know how to use a word processor. Besides that, I have read quite a few books; granted, a lot of them were about anatomy and pharmacology and anesthetics. As for basketball, I played for Jerry Petitgoue, who has the most wins in the history of Wisconsin high school basketball. I was instrumental in at least one of them. (You could have said I was one of the best half-milers to play for Petitgoue.) Despite my brush with adequacy as a player, I did learn a lot about basketball. That knowledge didn’t help me much then, but it came to be yet another example of how stuff I learned as a kid became unexpectedly useful as an adult. That leaves the quadratic formula, LaPlace’s law and relativity, for which I have not yet encountered practical utility. (Just kidding–I use all that stuff all the time.) My greatest fear during your weeks of neglect is that my readership will dwindle. Actually, that’s not my greatest fear. My greatest fear is being trapped in a disabled leaky smoke-filled submarine full of angry poisonous spiders. Truthfully though, I am not that worried about losing you because I am one of the commodities you can still afford in these hard economic times. There will never be a better bargain than free, even if it is unreliable. ____________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column written by soon-to-be one-time some-selling author, Steven R. Lagman, etc, etc. The author trusts that readers will respect the exclusivity of the information contained herein by not using it to write their own some-selling book about coaching basketball because if they do they will have to do all the organization, editing and reorganization, and–yuck–proofreading, not to mention book signings in Fort Cobb, Oklahoma and Lingle, Wyoming. ©2009 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.