The Coach's Art

Jack Ramsay (1925-2014) was a long-time NCAA and NBA basketball coach, winning an NBA championship in 1977 as head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers. Ramsay's autobiography The Coach's Art is high-level and has very little actual basketball strategy, but he has a deep appreciation for the beauty of the game:

What is this game that runs through my mind? It is a ballet, a graceful sweep and flow of patterned movement, counterpoised by daring and imaginative flights of solitary brilliance. It is a dance which begins with opposition contesting every move. But in the exhilaration of a great performance, the opposition vanishes. The dancer does as he pleases. The game is unified action up and down the floor. It is quickness, it is strength; it is skill, it is stamina; it is five men playing as one…It is the solidarity of a single unifying purpose, the will to overcome adversity, the determination never to give in.

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