@RockChalkRedlock
I have been interested in how and by what rules teams move around the floor from an early age. Dancers also fascinate me in the same way, but I had no dancers in my family. :-)
I learned about basketball offenses very generally from my Dad around the age of 8. I learned about a specific offense, Bruce Drake's Shuffle Offense, at age 10 from my brother, who was learning it from his high school coach. I became kind of obsessed with basketball as a result of trying to figure out why Wooden and UCLA could beat everyone, especially my Jayhawks, all of the time, whether Wooden had a bunch of guys under 6-5 that no one had recruited hard, or when Wooden had some of the most talented teams of all time. Remember: he had undefeated seasons with both kinds of teams.
My ability to learn from others about offensive and defensive schemes has been there from the beginning. If you would tell it to me, I could spit it back with just a bit of insight about it. But, frankly, few either knew, or cared to teach me as much about it as I wanted to know. For most of childhood, I had no idea why I wanted to know so much about spatial activities and seemingly few others either wanted to know the same things, or didn't want to share what they knew.
So I pretty much played the game just for the love of it, and kept all the thinking about it to myself. Alas, I wasn't very good, so I didn't get to play long. I got cut my senior season for a lot of reasons, and limited talent was certainly a contributing factor. :-(
But once when I was young and broke I took a job surveying to try to save money to finish grad school. The guys on the crew were some of the roughest sons of bitches you could imagine. An Army Vietnam vet back in country three years with alcohol and anger management problems and post traumatic stress was my crew chief. Another guy was a Mexican illegal that had worked on a survey crew in Mexico before coming to America the hard way. Another guy on the crew had been a lumber jack in Idaho, fled a hit and run and had come to the southwest to lay low. Only the crew chief had been to college and he had only had a year. But all of these poorly educated, maladjusted, borderline crazy guys could use trig, a theodolite, a line rod, a chain, and maps, and find their way from brass caps at the edge of town 10-20 miles into the mountain wilderness, work as a team, and find a section corner marker on range and township baseline buried maybe since the railroad surveys of the mid 1800s and get back again without getting lost. This impressed me and, after first thinking they were a bunch of yahoos, I desperately wanted to be accepted by them as someone who could be relied on to hand signal right, calculate the expansion of the chain, and contribute to closing a square within an eighth of an inch going around the perimeter of a section, or two, while watching out for snakes and scorpions. They could do it, but I could not concentrate steadily enough. I was too sloppy. I day dreamed. I was thinking too much. Finally, they threatened to kick my ass as a group and leave me out in the desert if I didn't get my shizz together. I did. And was shortly accepted, though never respected because I was trying to save my money to go back to school. School was for pussies that could not cut it in the real world. Anyway, what I learned from these guys was that there was a small subsegment of human beings that are spatial attuned. They can think spatially, even if they can't read a detective mystery, or a newspaper. They can read maps and they can teach themselves trig, even though they can't, or won't, balance their check books. Out in a 108 F desert holding a line rod I learned that I was a spatial person that had been trapped in schools learning reading, writing, and arithmetic and some grossly oversimplified history all divorced from space. It was a big moment for me.
Over the years I have gravitated toward activities that have required an aptitude for spatial analysis.
Over the years I began to think more and more about basketball as a spatial game, rather than just a fun game, and about offenses and defenses as kinds of complex, high speed, surveys through space and time; things that might even be translated into mathematical algorithms.
Then I got a dose of feasibility and statistics in another grad school. It was all greek to me until I found a statistics professor that translated statistics into a probabilistic study of spatially distributed data points that in combination constituted a topology that was in effect a topographic map of quantities in place and time. Voila! Statistics all made sense suddenly! No more boredom. Relevance. A way of dealing with the uncertainties that crop up in spatial relations.
Then I got a dose of game theory along with informal strategy and I made the connection between spatial distribution of stuff, the movement of that stuff, the probabilities associated with the movement of that stuff, and the ways strategy and tactics could alter an opponents ability to anticipate and match up with that stuff, and the connections between topologies and topographies and so on.
It all hurt to learn each step of the way, because I kept having to surrender thinking I understood things, decide I did not, and then learn some more.
Learning hurts. Don't let anyone fool you.
But man does it feel good once you do learn it. :-)
Each step of the way, I have been able to see a little deeper into the game, even though I was learning that stuff for other things. I have been able to recognize more and more what coaches and players are either intentionally, or accidentally doing on the floor.
I am still bumfuzzled a lot of the time, just like anyone else.
But I have the spatial tools to analyze what is going on and eventually get it, if I keep after it.
I don't know if non-spatial persons can do it or not.
I only know that I am a spatial person and that if I work at it, with the tool box I have, I can wade through and get it eventually.
But let me tell you: it helps a whole lot to have other folks around contributing their bits and pieces of insights. Sometimes they say something in just the right way, something you have thought, or heard, a hundred times before, and you just go, aha, that' the missing piece I have been looking for to fit into this bigger, or smaller puzzle I have been thinking about.
What I like so much about Self is that he throws out a few bones to all of us arm chair analysts about what he is doing. He is probably almost a savant like spatial thinker. Way the hell over my head in that regard. I would bet that he actually has trouble saying exactly what he knows about certain parts of basketball, because basketball is a spatial activity with a lot of n-dimensional simultaneity to its processes, where as language is a very linear accretion of subjects, verbs and objects. A spatial thinker talking about basketball is kind of like a musician talking about music. He can sort of explain what he is doing and thinking musically, but not really. Same with a mathematician. Unless you speak math, some of it is hard to relate in English. Same with translating any language and way of thinking into another language and way of thinking. Some things get lost in translation, but maybe the big picture gets through, if the person doing the translating works hard to get the essence through.
So, the answer is: I could always do this some, but I have gotten better at doing it as I have learned more tools for dealing with space and what goes on in it.
Hope that helps.
Rock Chalk!
