Bill Walton and the Secret To Life

"Can you make the choice that your happiness can come from someone else's success?"

-Bill Walton

I just finished Bill Simmons' "The Book of Basketball". 2 1/2 days (I got it Tuesday morning), and almost 700 pages of basketball talk. I'm a basketball fan-have been for years, so I naturally enjoyed it. It's really good, and I have that feeling I get after finishing a really good read-though I'm tired and glad to move on (next up is either the new Vonnegut collection or Janna Levin's "How The Universe Got Its Spots" or "The League That Lasted" about the 1876 National League), I am kind of sad that it's over. That, in a friend's memorable phrase, I can never read it for the first time again.

It is a long (obviously), detailed essay, treatise, and analysis of basketball history, with analysis and ranking of players and teams. He frames the book by talking about something he calls "The Secret".

Not that Secret.

Basketball, like all team sports, is an activity where people have to work together to achieve a common goal. Every year, one champion is crowned, and all the other teams go home unhappy. There are plenty of teams with just as much talent, and sometimes with a lot more, than the champions. These other teams are going home without rings while one group dances around celebrating with the trophy. Simmons' entire book is an effort to uncover The Secret-what is the secret to winning basketball? Writ large, what is the key to success?

He begins with a conversation he had with Isaiah Thomas, a Hall of Fame basketball player who became a comically bad coach and GM in later years, in which Thomas cryptically says, "the secret of basketball is that it's not about basketball". Simmons then spends 650 plus pages talking about players, teams, and games, and ends with a discussion with Hall of Famer Bill Walton about the same thing, where Walton offers the above quote.

The point they are trying to make is the great teams and players-the successful ones-the ones that stand out from the other teams that have good players too-are the ones who most effectively grasp The Secret-the idea that, as Walton says, you need to choose to enjoy the success of others. You need to put the goals of the group ahead of your own goals.

To expand just a tad, isn't that true in life, too? In basketball, someone needs to take the shot, of course. You need some aggression, some confidence, some, I suppose, greed. But the greed has to be channeled. The aggression has to be towards the goal of group success-which is winning basketball games. You have to care about winning more than personal goals.

"Love", Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, "is the state where someone else's happiness is indispensable to one's own."

Isn't that exactly the point?

Isn't that "The Secret"?