David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible.

5.
    One of the things that happened to Redwood City the minute the team started winning basketball games was that opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of youth basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Ranadivé’s girls, they felt, were not really playing basketball. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press, a twelve-year-old girl learned much more valuable lessons—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.
    “There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”
    Roger Craig said that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs, ‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”
    “One time, we were playing this team from East San Jose,” Ranadivé said. “They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age, the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head. You should never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw the guy out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”
    All the qualities that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and finely calibrated execution. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable: a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out-of-bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.
    T. E. Lawrence could triumph because he was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from the top English military academy. He was an archaeologist by trade who wrote dreamy prose. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. He didn’t care what people in the military establishment thought about his “untrained rabble” because he had little invested in the military establishment. And then there’s David. He must have known that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. But he was a shepherd, which in ancient times was one of the lowliest of all professions. He had no stake in the finer points of military ritual.
    We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options. Vivek Ranadivé stood on the sidelines as the opposing teams’ parents and coaches heaped abuse on him. Most people would have shrunk in the face of that kind of criticism. Not Ranadivé. It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before. Why should he care what the world of basketball thought of him? Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.

6.
    At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County.