Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Some players could take it better than others. Steve Alford, who went on to have a professional career, had come to Indiana with clear goals in mind and was able to maintain a strong growth focus much of the time. He was able to hear and use Knight’s wisdom and, for the most part, ignore the obscene or demeaning parts of the tirades. But even he describes how the team broke down under the yoke of Knight’s judgments, and how he himself became so personally unhappy at some points that he lost his zest for the sport.

“The atmosphere was poisonous.… When I had been playing well I had always stayed upbeat, no matter how much Coach yelled.… But now his negativism, piled on top of my own, was drowning me.… Mom and Dad were concerned. They could see the love of the game going out of me.”

THE HOLY GRAIL: NO MISTAKES

Says Alford, “Coach’s Holy Grail was the mistake-free game.” Uh-oh. We know which mindset makes mistakes intolerable. And Knight’s explosions were legendary. There was the time he threw the chair across the court. There was the time he yanked his player off the court by his jersey. There was the time he grabbed his player by the neck. He often tried to justify his behavior by saying he was toughening the team up, preparing them to play under pressure. But the truth is, he couldn’t control himself. Was the chair a teaching exercise? Was the chokehold educational?

He motivated his players, not through respect for them, but through intimidation—through fear. They feared his judgments and explosions. Did it work?

Sometimes it “worked.” He had three championship teams. In the “season on the brink” described by John Feinstein, the team did not have size, experience, or quickness, but they were contenders. They won twenty-one games, thanks to Knight’s great basketball knowledge and coaching skills.

But other times, it didn’t work. Individual players or the team as a whole broke down. In the season on the brink, they collapsed at the end of the season. The year before, too, the team had collapsed under Knight’s pressure. Over the years, some players had escaped by transferring to other schools, by breaking the rules (like cutting classes or skipping tutoring sessions), or by going early to the pros, like Isiah Thomas. On a world tour, the players often sat around fantasizing about where they should have gone to school, if they hadn’t made the mistake of choosing Indiana.

It’s not that Knight had a fixed mindset about his players’ ability. He firmly believed in their capacity to develop. But he had a fixed mindset about himself and his coaching ability. The team was his product, and they had to prove his ability every t tht. They were not allowed to lose games, make mistakes, or question him in any way, because that would reflect on his competence. Nor did he seem to analyze his motivational strategies when they weren’t working. Maybe Daryl Thomas needed another kind of incentive aside from ridicule or humiliation.

What are we to make of this complicated man as a mentor to young players? His biggest star, Isiah Thomas, expresses his profound ambivalence about Knight. “You know there were times when if I had a gun, I think I would have shot him. And there were other times when I wanted to put my arms around him, hug him, and tell him I loved him.”

I would not consider myself an unqualified success if my best student had considered shooting me.

The Growth-Mindset Coach in Action

A COACH FOR ALL SEASONS

Coach John Wooden produced one of the greatest championships records in sports. He led the UCLA basketball team to the NCAA Championship in 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, and 1975. There were seasons when his team was undefeated, and they once had an eighty-eight-game winning streak. All this I sort of knew.

What I didn’t know was that when Wooden arrived at UCLA, it was a far cry from a basketball dynasty. In fact, he didn’t want to work at UCLA at all. He wanted to go to Minnesota. It was arranged that Minnesota would phone him at six o’clock on a certain evening to tell him if he had the job. He told UCLA to call him at seven. No one called at six, six thirty, or even six forty-five, so when UCLA called at seven, he said yes. No sooner had he hung up than the call from Minnesota came. A storm had messed up the phone lines and prevented the six o’clock phone call with the job offer from getting through.

UCLA had grossly inadequate facilities. For his first sixteen years, Wooden held practice in a crowded, dark, and poorly ventilated gym, known as the B.O. Barn because of the atmospheric effect of the sweating bodies. In the same gym, there were often wrestling matches, gymnastics training, trampoline jumping, and cheerleading workouts going on alongside basketball practice.