In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful-in terms of armed might and population-as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases.
The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”ĭavid’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. The team ended up at the national championships. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way-if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition-they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good? Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press-that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.
He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. This was National Junior Basketball-the Little League of basketball. The first was that he would never raise his voice. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles.