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

Craig said, nodding.
    “We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.”
    Ranadivé said “tired” with a note of approval in his voice. His father was a pilot who was jailed by the Indian government because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of the country’s planes. Ranadivé went to MIT after he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the 1970s, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his money. Ranadivé is slender and fine-boned, with a languorous walk and an air of imperturbability. But none of that should be mistaken for nonchalance. The Ranadivés are relentless.
    He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”
    The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison: “One, two, three, attitude! ”
    The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
    “One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had, I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not one, two, three, attitude. It’s one, two, three, attitude, hah! ’”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

4.
    In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J—one of the greatest athletes ever to play the game of basketball. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, on the other hand, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of practice and was out, which meant that their tallest player was six foot five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was only six foot two. But from the opening buzzer, the Rams launched a full-court press, and they never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won 87–79.
    In the world of basketball, there are countless stories like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. What did Digger Phelps do the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. And the UMass coach, Jack Leaman, who was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids—did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not. Many people in the world of basketball don’t really believe in the press because it’s not perfect: it can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers. Even Ranadivé readily admitted as much. All an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back. The girls were not good enough to handle a taste of their own medicine. But all those objections miss the point. If Ranadivé’s girls or Fordham’s scrappy overachievers had played the conventional way, they would have lost by thirty points. The press was the best chance the underdog had of beating Goliath. Logically, every team that comes in as an underdog should play that