The mental trick that made Bill Russell an NBA Hall of Famer (#65)
The visualization technique that started the all-time great down a path of excellence
Bill Russell is known as one of the best defensive players in NBA history.
He also won 11 championships with the Boston Celtics, and is widely regarded as one of the best 10 or 20 players ever to play the game.
But it wasn’t always that way.
In fact, as Russell tells in his autobiography, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man, he wasn’t one of the best players on his high school team.
He only started to get good on a traveling team at the very end of high school. One of his secrets, as he tells it, is a visualization trick, one that I have since used successfully on the athletic field since and beyond, and one I think perhaps one of the most underutilized methods of improvement.
What that mental trick is—and how Russell used it—is the subject of today’s OGT.
See the play in your mind
Russell lucked onto the traveling team just at the end of high school, busing around the country playing other high school teams. At first, he had no business on the team (and his playing time reflected that). But then he made this discovery, and it turned everything around.
Within a week after the…tour began something happened that opened my eyes and chilled my spine. I was sitting on the bench, watching Treu and McKelvy the way I always did. Everytime one of them would make one of the moves I liked I’d close my eyes just afterward and try to see the play in my mind. In other words, I’d try to create an instant replay on the inside of my eyelids.
Russell had started doing this a few years back in an attempt to get good at art.
He would steal reprints of famous paintings from the library, like The Mona Lisa. He’d take them home, stare at them for hours, and try to recall them in his head until he had them memorized. Then, he would recreate them on paper.
He soon realized two things. First, he wasn’t a skilled artist. He’d miss important details and misshape intricate pieces such that his drawings looked juvenile. But, second, this was a useful skill he might use in the future.
Basketball, it turned out, was the right application.
On this particular night I was working replays of many plays, including McKelvy’s way of taking an offensive rebound and moving quickly to the hoop. It’s a fairly simple play for any big man in basketball but I didn’t execute it well and McKelvy did.
Since I had an accurate version of the technique in my head, I started playing the image right there on the bench, running back the picture several times and each time inserting the part of me for McKelvy. Finally, I saw myself making the whole move and I ran this over and over, too.
When I went into the game, I grabbed an offensive rebound and put it in the basket just the way McKelvy did. It seemed natural, almost as if I were stepping into a film and following the signs. When the imitation worked and the ball went in, I could barely contain myself…for the first time I had transferred something from my head to my body. It seemed so easy.
My first dose of athletic confidence was coming to me when I was 18 years old.
After that first success, Russell became obsessed with this.
He would watch carefully all practice, and spend the hours-long bus rides just running them back through his mind, again and again. He got so good, that he could even coach himself.
If I had a play in my mind but muffed it on court, I’d go over it repeatedly in my head, searching for the details I’d missed.
He then made another discovery, one that started his pursuit of excellence on defense.
For guards and quicker players, he saw the plays they made, but couldn’t make use of them on offense. Do he did something creative—the opposite.
It was frustrating to think that some of the images I had assembled were useless, so finally, I started imaging myself in plays with Treu [the best guard]. He’d be spinning for a lay-up, and I’d be shadowing him on defense…I’d imagine myself as his mirror image…when I saw him go up to lay the ball in the basket, I’d see myself go up and block the shot.
The first time Russell executed a blocked shot on Treu after this visualization technique had prepared him for it, he finally felt like he found his own thing.
…those defensive moves were the first moves I’d invented on my own and then made real. I didn’t copy them; I invented them.
They grew out of my imagination, and so I saw them as my own.
The OGT: Visualize it first
Plenty of high performers, no matter what field, have discussed the power of visualization. Of watching the details of an event unfold before executing it.
In Be Useful, Arnold writes how before he does anything, he see’s the picture clear in his mind. Before Rafa Nadal beat Federer for his first Wimbeldon title in 2008, he saw the match occurring in his mind. Henry Ford, Oprah, The Wrights—all big time visualizers.
I actually used Russell’s exact method to make a play in my weekend pick-up game. It watched replays of Jimmy Butler making this one layup from the left side, clearing the defender with his body, and finishing with his left. I then went over it again and again until I thought I had it. That weekend— it worked.
I also see it’s utility (as many have) in imagining your future. Of who or how you want to be. Of how you want things to unfold. You imagine them, and then you go over them again and again, day after day, until, like Russell, like Arnold, like The Wrights, you can see it happening clearly.
Then, of course, you have to do it.