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‘Getting to Us’ Review: The Saints of the Sidelines
From Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim to Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, the best coaches in sports get their players to work together as a collective unit. Tom Perrotta reviews “Getting to Us” by Seth Davis.
By Tom Perrotta
April 1, 2018
Early in the 1981-82 season, his second as the coach of Duke University’s men’s basketball team, Mike Krzyzewski cried in the shower. Duke had lost four of its first five games, and it wouldn’t have been a surprise if Mr. Krzyzewski needed to start worrying about his job. Did he recruit the wrong players? Had he run the wrong plays, or destroyed the confidence of the team? Whatever it was, Mr. Krzyzewski was sure he had to figure it out quickly.
By now you know the result: Mr. Krzyzewski is still the coach of Duke, whose team has won five NCAA College Championships and this year made it to the Elite Eight before being knocked out by the Kansas Jayhawks.
To learn exactly how Coach K got from there to here, you can pick up “Getting to Us: How Great Coaches Make Great Teams” by Seth Davis, the longtime college basketball expert who, among other roles, is part of the CBS broadcast during the college basketball season. This series of profiles is a brisk and colorful companion if you want to know how several of the best coaches in college hoops operate. (It also offers vivid sketches of college football coaches, like Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, and pro coaches like the Los Angeles Clippers’ Doc Rivers. )
The winning coaches Mr. Davis writes about often don’t seem to have much in common. Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, who has won one NCAA championship and five Big Ten tournaments, sums up what seems to me the most prominent theme. “I don’t think I’m the best coach,” he tells the author, “but I do think I work as hard as anybody.” Hard-working he may be, but Mr. Izzo also comes across as boisterous, friendly and energetic. He always leaves his office door open, we’re told. Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, by contrast, is dry and taciturn. The master of the zone defense in college basketball does not celebrate victories, and constantly fears defeat. “It’s all about losing,” he tells the author. “When we win, I’m pretty happy for about an hour, and then I’m thinking about the next game. When we lose, I’m thinking about that game until we get to the next one.” Mr. Boeheim doesn’t build relationships with his players the way that Mr. Izzo does, but it doesn’t matter. Mr. Boeheim has now been head coach at Syracuse for more than 40 years and competed in the NCAA tournament more than 30 times, including this year, when his team made it to the Sweet 16 but lost—to Coach K’s Blue Devils.
Then there’s Geno Auriemma, the coach of the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team, who has 11 national championships to his name. While winning title after title‚ he’s helped change the way people viewed women’s basketball. (“He would coach them just as hard as he would coach men,” Mr. Davis says the coach vowed to himself early in his career.) Of all the characters in the book, Mr. Auriemma—boisterous, demanding and relentless—has accomplished the most. But Mr. Davis also has a fine chapter on a young coach who’s still getting started, 41-year-old Brad Stevens, who twice coached the men’s team of tiny Butler University to the NCAA Championship game. Mr. Stevens now leads the young and talented Boston Celtics.
These coaches are certainly some of the best around, and just hearing their stories can be educational, but somewhere along the line either Mr. Davis or his publishers became convinced that storytelling alone wasn’t good enough. He needed a big idea about what makes these men great leaders. So Mr. Davis proposes two. First he suggests that this very disparate group of individuals all share what he calls PEAK qualities: persistence, empathy, authenticity and knowledge. Then he also claims they have a common strategy, what he calls “Getting to Us”—essentially, turning a team of individuals into one powerful “Us.” Mr. Davis introduces these terms into every chapter but thankfully doesn’t write about them for very long. Still, when they appear, they cause confusion and, for me, provoke disbelief.
As far as I can tell, Mr. Davis didn’t talk to his subjects about his “Us” and PEAK theories, perhaps knowing full well how they would respond: “What are you talking about?” Here’s just one occasion where the author’s jargon seems out of touch: “Whenever one of his players finally does buckle under all the stress, Auriemma unleashes all the dimensions of his PEAK profile.” Mr. Auriemma puts it better, and more simply: “ blow so much smoke up their butt that they feel like they’re the king of the world.” Maybe Mr. Davis never spoke to his subjects about PEAK or “Us,” because the ideas were not in his head until after his interviews were done. But why not follow up?
Even if you accept Mr. Davis’s concepts as real, they seem too diffuse to have much meaning. The author lavishes praise on Jim Harbaugh, currently the coach of the University of Michigan’s football team, despite little evidence that he fits the author’s model of a team-centered coach. Mr. Harbaugh is a hard-charger, one who does things his way or no way. For a while, this worked, and in four short years he led the San Francisco 49ers to the playoffs and a Super Bowl. But, as Mr. Davis says of Mr. Harbaugh, “diplomacy has never been his forte.” More important, as the author himself notes, the coach’s professional players on the 49ers—who should have been believers in “Us”—grew tired of the ways he treated them like children, including banning “music and card games on flights because he wanted them to focus on the game.”
Is Jim Harbaugh an intelligent man and a capable coach? For sure. But is he the type that players love for long periods, and will do anything for? The jury, I suppose, is out. I wonder if Mr. Davis shouldn’t have focused on a different Michigan coach, John Beilein, who rarely gets elite recruits but, for the second time in six years, has taken his basketball team to the championship game of the NCAA tournament.
Mr. Perrotta writes about tennis and other sports for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.
From Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim to Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, the best coaches in sports get their players to work together as a collective unit. Tom Perrotta reviews “Getting to Us” by Seth Davis.
By Tom Perrotta
April 1, 2018
Early in the 1981-82 season, his second as the coach of Duke University’s men’s basketball team, Mike Krzyzewski cried in the shower. Duke had lost four of its first five games, and it wouldn’t have been a surprise if Mr. Krzyzewski needed to start worrying about his job. Did he recruit the wrong players? Had he run the wrong plays, or destroyed the confidence of the team? Whatever it was, Mr. Krzyzewski was sure he had to figure it out quickly.
By now you know the result: Mr. Krzyzewski is still the coach of Duke, whose team has won five NCAA College Championships and this year made it to the Elite Eight before being knocked out by the Kansas Jayhawks.
To learn exactly how Coach K got from there to here, you can pick up “Getting to Us: How Great Coaches Make Great Teams” by Seth Davis, the longtime college basketball expert who, among other roles, is part of the CBS broadcast during the college basketball season. This series of profiles is a brisk and colorful companion if you want to know how several of the best coaches in college hoops operate. (It also offers vivid sketches of college football coaches, like Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, and pro coaches like the Los Angeles Clippers’ Doc Rivers. )
The winning coaches Mr. Davis writes about often don’t seem to have much in common. Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, who has won one NCAA championship and five Big Ten tournaments, sums up what seems to me the most prominent theme. “I don’t think I’m the best coach,” he tells the author, “but I do think I work as hard as anybody.” Hard-working he may be, but Mr. Izzo also comes across as boisterous, friendly and energetic. He always leaves his office door open, we’re told. Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, by contrast, is dry and taciturn. The master of the zone defense in college basketball does not celebrate victories, and constantly fears defeat. “It’s all about losing,” he tells the author. “When we win, I’m pretty happy for about an hour, and then I’m thinking about the next game. When we lose, I’m thinking about that game until we get to the next one.” Mr. Boeheim doesn’t build relationships with his players the way that Mr. Izzo does, but it doesn’t matter. Mr. Boeheim has now been head coach at Syracuse for more than 40 years and competed in the NCAA tournament more than 30 times, including this year, when his team made it to the Sweet 16 but lost—to Coach K’s Blue Devils.
Then there’s Geno Auriemma, the coach of the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team, who has 11 national championships to his name. While winning title after title‚ he’s helped change the way people viewed women’s basketball. (“He would coach them just as hard as he would coach men,” Mr. Davis says the coach vowed to himself early in his career.) Of all the characters in the book, Mr. Auriemma—boisterous, demanding and relentless—has accomplished the most. But Mr. Davis also has a fine chapter on a young coach who’s still getting started, 41-year-old Brad Stevens, who twice coached the men’s team of tiny Butler University to the NCAA Championship game. Mr. Stevens now leads the young and talented Boston Celtics.
These coaches are certainly some of the best around, and just hearing their stories can be educational, but somewhere along the line either Mr. Davis or his publishers became convinced that storytelling alone wasn’t good enough. He needed a big idea about what makes these men great leaders. So Mr. Davis proposes two. First he suggests that this very disparate group of individuals all share what he calls PEAK qualities: persistence, empathy, authenticity and knowledge. Then he also claims they have a common strategy, what he calls “Getting to Us”—essentially, turning a team of individuals into one powerful “Us.” Mr. Davis introduces these terms into every chapter but thankfully doesn’t write about them for very long. Still, when they appear, they cause confusion and, for me, provoke disbelief.
As far as I can tell, Mr. Davis didn’t talk to his subjects about his “Us” and PEAK theories, perhaps knowing full well how they would respond: “What are you talking about?” Here’s just one occasion where the author’s jargon seems out of touch: “Whenever one of his players finally does buckle under all the stress, Auriemma unleashes all the dimensions of his PEAK profile.” Mr. Auriemma puts it better, and more simply: “ blow so much smoke up their butt that they feel like they’re the king of the world.” Maybe Mr. Davis never spoke to his subjects about PEAK or “Us,” because the ideas were not in his head until after his interviews were done. But why not follow up?
Even if you accept Mr. Davis’s concepts as real, they seem too diffuse to have much meaning. The author lavishes praise on Jim Harbaugh, currently the coach of the University of Michigan’s football team, despite little evidence that he fits the author’s model of a team-centered coach. Mr. Harbaugh is a hard-charger, one who does things his way or no way. For a while, this worked, and in four short years he led the San Francisco 49ers to the playoffs and a Super Bowl. But, as Mr. Davis says of Mr. Harbaugh, “diplomacy has never been his forte.” More important, as the author himself notes, the coach’s professional players on the 49ers—who should have been believers in “Us”—grew tired of the ways he treated them like children, including banning “music and card games on flights because he wanted them to focus on the game.”
Is Jim Harbaugh an intelligent man and a capable coach? For sure. But is he the type that players love for long periods, and will do anything for? The jury, I suppose, is out. I wonder if Mr. Davis shouldn’t have focused on a different Michigan coach, John Beilein, who rarely gets elite recruits but, for the second time in six years, has taken his basketball team to the championship game of the NCAA tournament.
Mr. Perrotta writes about tennis and other sports for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.