Stardom? They'd Rather Pass

By Richard Stengel

I'm not a fan. I never root for one team over another because I generally don't care who wins. But I admit I do feel vindicated by the Princeton University basketball team's 26-and-1 record and its rank of No. 8 in the country. I confess I wouldn't be all that disappointed if the team wins a couple of games in the NCAA championships that start this week. But only because it might teach a lesson to the guys I play pickup basketball with on Tuesday nights.

I was a scrub, a sophomore backup guard, on the last great Princeton squad, the team that won the National Invitational Tournament in 1975. I can't take much credit for the victory, except that I did occasionally force the first team to work up a sweat in practice, and I did absorb my fair share of the coaches' abuse. But the real curse of a Princeton basketball education is that it renders you unfit for pickup games for the rest of your life. No one looks for the open man. No one sees you when you go backdoor. Guys hog the ball and force shots from 30 feet. My inner coach wants to bench all these Michael Jordan wannabes. But it's a lost cause. You see such play everywhere these days. Especially in the NBA.

The current Princeton team plays exactly the way my team did, with a few new wrinkles and some better athletes. My coach was the ornery philosopher Pete Carril. Princeton's current coach, Bill Carmody, apprenticed under Carril for 14 years. Carril saw the 94-ft. by 54-ft. hard court as a moral playground where the cardinal virtue was unselfishness. The embodiment of unselfishness was the assist, the small act of grace of giving up the ball to a teammate who has a better shot. Check out the box score of a Princeton game: the team gets two-thirds of its baskets off assists, a rarity in this era of run-and-gun shooters who have eyes only for the hoop.

For the past 30 years, Princeton players have been bullied and brainwashed into looking for the pass first and the shot second. When the leather of the roundball touches your hands, your first thought is, Who else is open? Not, How am I gonna get my shot? It's not easy to learn, and it goes against the grain of me-first American individualism and the lure of million-dollar sneaker contracts. The highest skill of a Princeton basketball player is not to run, jump or shoot but to see. And it is still the rarest basketball skill of all.

Princeton is an anomaly not just because it starts five anonymous white guys in what has become a game of bigger-than-life black stars, but because in basketball today, individualism pays. Fans buy tickets to see darting one-on-one moves, awesome dunks and 30-point games by players with multimillion-dollar endorsement deals, not pinpoint bounce passes and pretty pick-and-rolls by a bunch of unknowns whose leading scorer is averaging under 15 points a game.

The real genius of the Princeton offense is not its moral idealism but its real-world practicality. At every moment you have a set of binary options that anticipates each possible move of your opponent--and gives you a way to overcome it. Is your man overplaying you? Cut backdoor. Is he sloughing off? Come out for the pass. If your teammate dribbles toward you, either cut away or scoot round for a hand-off. As if you were playing judo with a ball, you always use the strength of your opponent against him.

It just so happens that the Princeton offense, with its patient, intricate passing, is suited to the type of player who goes to school there: mostly kids who score at least 1,100 on their SATs, whose parents have houses with two-car garages, and who think about business school, not the NBA, after they graduate. It's a system designed for white boys who can't jump, though this year's team--which has beaten Texas, North Carolina State and Wake Forest and lost by only eight points to No. 2-ranked North Carolina--has kids who can. Mitch Henderson, the senior co-captain with eyes in the back of his head, had another option when he was accepted by Princeton: to play baseball for the Yankees.

At the moment, the five Princeton starters not only have to carry a complicated offense around in their heads but must also bear the weight of being the moral dream team of out-of- shape editorial writers who see the Tigers as the antidote to all the greed and thuggery of big-time sports. But it's unfair to these kids to label them warriors of virtue in a venal world. I promise you, all they are thinking about is winning games, not winning hearts and minds.

But after they graduate, when they're taking depositions, not jump shots, and trying to keep away the paunch by playing in pickup games on weekends and evenings, they are going to find that they're playing a different game from everyone else on the court. Basketball is more than just a metaphor for who we are; we show who we are when we play it.

I've never bothered to try to explain to the guys I play with on Tuesday nights why I don't shoot more. Mainly, I'm just trying to get a workout and not get hurt, but I suppose on another level, I'm still looking for the open man.