The team sport that I most like to watch at the local pizza joint is professional basketball. I used to like to play pick-up games, but I think that those are now in the past.
Below is an extraordinary interview with a trainer. There is a lot of embodied life understanding in this guy's work, and you see if their isn't inadvertently some spiritual expression.
But before I go to that, I want to mention an author interview I heard on sports radio a few days ago about the Red Sox and particularly Manny Ramirez. Several things came up and I'll only mention a few. People sometimes think that Manny is just one of those gifted freaks who can mash a ball with native talent alone; it was pointed out that he does meditation and visualization activities and is a very disciplined guy - contrary to his older reputation. Since then I read that he does subscribe to principles in "The Secret". Yet, what stood out for me was the going to the less material level of reality to improve the material - his flawless form, "his perfect swing".
On to basketball. ambo
http://www.nba.com/features/ravin_080509.html
Why Chris Paul Is So Good --
an Interview with Paul’s Personal Coach, Idan Ravin
SECAUCUS, NJ, May 9, 2024 -- If you were asked who Chris Paul's,
Carmelo Anthony's and Gilbert Arenas' coaches are and said Byron Scott,
George Karl and Eddie Jordan, respectively, you would only be partially
correct.
Even though they're on different NBA teams, Paul, Anthony and
Arenas, as well as players such as Elton Brand, Jerry Stackhouse and
Rudy Gay, all share the same coach, Idan Ravin.
You may remember Ravin from a recent Jordan Brand commercial featuring Carmelo Anthony running a gamut of intense workout drills with a man at his side pushing him every step of the way.
That man is Ravin. I caught up with the Washington D.C. based
training guru to discuss the breakout success of one of his clients,
Chris Paul, and to talk about the unique perspective on the NBA game
that his job affords him.
I want you to break down Chris Paul’s game for me. What does he possess that makes him so good?
Idan: There’s sort of the esoteric things and then there’s sort
of the substantive, basketball things. I think it’s the esoteric things
that make him really special. At the end of the day, everybody in the
NBA can go right, they can go left, they can shoot a jump shot, I mean
everybody has a certain threshold of talent. But what makes him so
special is his incredible tenacity and love for the game. It’s not like
this cliché, “We work hard.” Everybody says they work hard. But it’s
the efficiency and sort of the smarts in which he maximizes his time.
He’s super. He’s tenacious. He doesn’t back down.
"Melo learns fast, Gilbert Arenas learns fast,
Elton Brand learns fast and Chris was learning just as fast as they
were. So I’m thinking, 'This kid is interesting to me.'"
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I can give you a story, it kind of goes back because I’ve worked with
Chris for a long time, it was from when I was prepping him for the
Draft. Workouts are always really, really challenging and Chris wanted
to workout with somebody else there with him. And I told him, “No,
Chris, you have to do everything by yourself for a while.” So I
remember, I got a call from a top front office person from an NBA team
who was going to be in the area and they wanted to stop by our
workouts. So I said, “Sure, you guys can come by.”
This was a senior, senior head guy from a team.
So I called Gilbert Arenas, and I was like, “Hey Gilbert, why
don’t you come by and workout today with Chris.” Gilbert was like, “OK,
sure.”
So we pull up the gym and Chris is waiting outside and I see
his eyes just light up, because not only is he working out with
someone, he’s working out with Gilbert Arenas who is like a top seven
player in the NBA. He was excited to finally get to go and battle.
The first half an hour we just did a lot of drills and stuff,
and the last half an hour we did a lot of competitive drills with a lot
of 1-on-1 and spots. I probably want to say Chris won every single
game. Now, 1-on-1 doesn’t mean much, but it does mean something. When
you’re a 19-year old kid and you’re going up against a top six or seven
player in the NBA and you don’t back down, you’re just ferocious.
After the workout Gilbert came up to me and was like, “That kid
is going to be special.” To this day, Chris and Gilbert are very good
friends. But that minute kind of showed me that there’s no fear in him.
When you step off the court, he’s a gentle, humble, kind, modest kid, but in those 90 feet, he’s a lion, man.
You
see this kid come in and you see his mental toughness and his
willingness to be great, that’s got to be a challenge for you to take
all that and turn it into something better. What was your approach with
him, specifically?
Idan: I think in the beginning you want to gauge where they are.
Everyone going to the NBA has a great pedigree and resume, right? So
everyone has a certain threshold, but it’s more about finding out, “How
fast does he learn?” You can put him through a drill that works on his
dribbling efficiency and how he scores and how fast he kind of captures
and learns the drill makes you think, “Man, that's unbelievable.” Melo
learns fast, Gilbert Arenas learns fast, Elton Brand learns fast and
Chris was learning just as fast as they were. So I’m thinking, “This
kid is interesting to me.” So then you make the drill so unbelievably
unreasonable and rigorous every time and he wouldn’t back down. He kept
on trying to master it. And then you reduce the time on a drill and he
tried to beat the time. He kept on showing you things about how
competitive he was. You’d say, “Gilbert does this drill in 47 seconds”
and Chris would be like, “I want to do it in 45.” I was just thinking,
“There’s something special here.” But after that Gilbert Arenas workout
I was like, “Man this kid is going to be something tremendous.”
Chris
Paul was asked about this confidence on the day he won the Rookie of
the Year trophy and he mentioned all of the workouts leading up to the
draft where you pushed him to work his hardest. How rewarding is that
to know that you are helping shape guys’ careers?
Idan: It feels great. To know that you’re an integral part of
their career is a great feeling. I kind of take a lot of pride in it.
The fact that they trust you with their careers is also something great
because there’s a million people they could choose to work with,
there’s a million people in their circle and then they choose you and
it becomes a great relationship over time.
Let’s
just say we know Chris Paul is going up against Tony Parker. Is that
something where you’ll go up to him or he’ll go up to you to talk about
certain matchups?
Idan: On stuff like that, it’s more like he already knows what
he has to do kind of thing. I think in terms of the bigger picture,
it’s not like, “Chris, here’s how you’re going to beat Tony Parker off
the dribble.” It’s more of the big picture like, “You need to continue
to be very efficient with your moves, you need to work on your angles
better, you need to stepback stronger …” It’s more things to keep the
big picture rather than how are you going to compete against a
particular player.
So most of the work happens over the summers, I guess?
Idan: No, not at all. I have a lot of work during the year. For
example, when Elton Brand was coming back I was with Elton Brand for
five weeks until he got cleared and then I spent a month with Gilbert
Arenas after he got cleared by the doctors. So, I do a lot during the
year as well. I think I have sort of a core group of guys that do above
and beyond what is normally expected. Come around April I do pre-Draft
with the Draft guys and after that I got to prepare Melo and Chris Paul
for the World Championships and once that’s over I have all of the
league guys, so it’s kind of become pretty much year round.
You
look at what having Michael Jordan’s trust did for Tim Grover, as Chris
Paul establishes himself as one of the top five players in this league,
that’s got to start bringing you more clients. Has that helped?
Idan: You know what, I hate to sound … I have a really good
client base already. Fortunately I have a really good base of clients I
work with – seven or eight All-Stars – so with respect to Chris helping
business, I’m sure it does, but I don’t really see it that way. My
concern is more like, “Let’s make sure every year that Chris is ready
to go and that Chris keeps on getting better and better and better and
one day he’s a Hall of Fame player and his jersey hangs from the
rafters and there’s nine championship rings on his fingers.” My
priority is each kid and not whether or not my business grows.
Part
of the appeal of your workouts seems to be the individual attention and
sort of private bunker mentality that the players take on when they
train with you. How funny was it to see one of your sessions in a
national ad campaign for the Jordan Brand?
Idan: When Melo and those guys asked me to do that commercial,
I was like, “Sure,” because I think in many ways, people think that
those All-Stars just were born All-Stars and I don’t think people see
how much time and effort goes into what they do.
It’s sort of the classic, “If I was 6-9, I’d be in the NBA too.”
Idan: Exactly. And then people start throwing the word
“politics” around or “favoritism” and I always think that that’s the
biggest excuse you could ever give. Because I don’t think people even
understand, Melo’s day is so full with so much, he has nine ba-zillion
off the court responsibilities, and he has a family and he has friends
and he has a life he wants to live. But he still commits himself to
perform and to practice.
Like I said before, it’s a very cliché expression to say, “work
hard.” Because anybody can say, “I work hard.” But at the end of the
day it’s like, “What exactly are you doing?”
The point of that commercial was, “Man, these drills are really hard
and they challenge 12 different sensories.” They challenge the way to
see, the way you feel, they challenge your peripheral vision, they
challenge so many different things that not only does it become a
physical workout, it’s a mental challenge as well.
That’s
a good segue. I read how you try to strengthen players’ minds. Tell me
about that? Is it sort of the mind over matter principle or are we
talking about something else?
Idan:I think it’s a bunch of different things. You create
situations that are so rigorous that you can accomplish situations that
aren’t so rigorous. I’ll give you the example that if you can take a
three-hour test in one hour, then you can obviously take the test in
three hours. You create situations that are so unreasonable that when
all of the sudden they’re reasonable, they look like a piece of cake.
Then you have situations where it’s not only to be able to do the
drill, the drill has to become instinctive. You can work on something
and they guy can think, “Oh yeah, I can do it,” but if the situation
presents itself on the court, is that going to be your intuitive
response? The only way for it to become that is to have done it so many
times in 55 different ways at such high speeds that your body will all
of the sudden be like, “OK, that’s how I have to respond to this
situation.”
Is
it a fraternity among you guys or is more like competition? I know
David Thorpe has parlayed his coaching into an analyst gig with ESPN.
Idan: I don’t know any of them and I don’t know what anybody
else does. It’s not that I don’t care, but what everyone else does,
good for them. It if works, great. I just know what I do and I just
focus on my guys. You know what I mean? I don’t come from any of those
fraternities, from any of those basketball fraternities, to me this
business has just grown organically. I don’t have business cards. I
have a website
but I did that begrudgingly just so I don’t have to talk too much,
because I’m kind of shy. So that’s how it works in that respect.
I
read that you worked with the Mavericks team at one point. How did that
suit you? Do you think you’d give up your private practice to become an
assistant coach for a team? Dave Hopla, a personal shooting coach,
recently joined the Wizards in a similar capacity.
Idan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, teams call me in all the time and say,
“Hey will you work with our guys?” I’ve gotten a ba-zillion job offers.
I’ve gotten a lot of job offers but it’s just sort of a balancing of
interest. I’m not saying that I’m wed to anything in particular. If
something came up that I feel like, “That’s a win,” and I want to do
it, I would do it. But I don’t need a job. I have great, great players.
I have great freedom. I work with a ba-zillion guys. I’m my own boss. I
know a lot of guys chase the jobs, but I’ve had a lot of job offers.
Who knows? If the New Yorker called you tomorrow and say, “Hey, we want
you to write for us,” you’d think about it. You think, “Do I want to
leave? Maybe I can be like a consultant/freelancer.”
I saw on your other business venture’s website, NicheClick Media, that you wrote “I have some good stories so remind me to tell you when we meet…” OK, so tell me one.
Idan: With the players, you mean? Oh my God, there’s so many funny ones. I’m trying to see where I should start.
Some of them are kind of like good-feeling stories.
One example – God, Melo might kill me for telling this story –
so Melo had a baby, a beautiful young boy, right? So, Melo never wants
to miss workouts. I remember, we were at workouts and it was his
fiancée’s birthday and he told her, “Hey, it’s a spa day for you, I’ll
watch the baby.” So he brings the baby to workouts. In between drills,
he’d finish the drill and then the baby would start crying. So Melo
would take the baby carriage and walk the baby all the way around the
basketball court and the baby would stop crying. And then he’ll come
back and do a drill. And then if he has to burp the baby or something,
he takes out the burping bag and does what he’s got to do, and then
comes right back to the court. But it’s nice because I think no one
sees that very good, gentle, kind, humble side of Carmelo and that’s
why I’m the first to defend him all the time. People don’t see the
ba-zillion nice things that he does.
I can give you another instance. Jerry Stackhouse is my guy.
He’s a great guy. I travel a lot with the players and I remember we
were down in a small town in North Carolina and we were at a restaurant
– a small, little diner type of thing – and we end up seeing a
childhood friend. You could tell the guy was kind of down on his luck,
you know? The guy was bussing tables. So Jerry gave him a hug and he
was talking to him for a little while. Then at the end of the meal, I
saw Jerry take out a couple hundred dollar bills and he folded them up
into little, tiny rectangles and he put a couple singles on top of
these hundred dollar bills and he left them as a tip. I thought, “Wow,
what a thoughtful thing to do.” He didn’t embarrass the guy by taking
out a couple hundred dollar bills and throw it in his face. It was such
a thoughtful way of doing a nice thing.
I’ve seen guys do stuff like that all the time. So, when the media
bashes these guys when they mess up, you know, we all do. We all mess
up. I wish they could see the ba-zillion nice things that these guys do
all the time that no one knows about.
The early entry candidates were announced last week. Are any of those guys training with you?
Idan: I expect a lot more, but so far I have Joey Dorsey, DaVon
Hardin, Drew Neitzel, James Gist … I’ll have a bunch of guys. I usually
have quite a bit.
I’ll group them by position, or group them by situations, so if it’s a
pick and roll day, then the bigs and smalls will go together. Or I’ll
put the smalls together in the morning and do the bigs in the
afternoon. It kind of depends on situations. If it’s sort of a
competitive day, then they’ll all go together and do kind of
competitive stuff against each other. Every day is sort of a
situational day, and that’s how I’ll break it up.
You
work with Gilbert and DeShawn Stevenson and they went up against
Delonte West, who you also worked with, in the First Round this year --
or the Mavericks with Stackhouse going against the Hornets with Paul.
Is it funny to see these juxtapositions of your guys go against each
other?
Idan: No, because, you know what it is? They’re competitive
people. They play a physical game. Just because a guy gets an elbow or
gets a punch or gets a bloody nose or something, to me, it’s not a
personal thing. It’s the nature of the sport. I see MMA fighters all
the time that hug afterwards. It’s just the nature of being in a
physical, physical game that’s very competitive that there’s a lot of
stakes going on. I can assure you that LeBron and DeShawn are going out
each other, but if they saw each other out during the summer, they’d
sit down and have lunch together. It’s a small group of guys that got
to a common place together, so they share that bond. But if you’re
going to say, “Is Chris Paul going to shake Jerry’s hand during the
game?” Why would he? It’s a game. It’s competition. But afterwards, I’m
sure they shook hands, they laughed, they broke bread together.
I
read that you’re learning from players constantly and you don’t want to
be “running in place.” What’s the next step, what’s the next level?
Idan: How do I see my business evolving? I come from a very
formal corporate world. I was a lawyer for many years and this and this
and everything was about business plans and this is something I love to
do and I never really had a formula for it. I just let it grow
organically and so, to me, however it evolves, it evolves. I don’t have
any plans for it. I enjoy it, I have great players, I’m sure I’ll have
more great players. I hope that the one thing I can leave people with
is, there is no easy road. No one got there just because they got
there.
“Sometimes I hear that guys are in the gym for 12 hours and I think to myself, ‘You just wasted 11 and a half of them.’”
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You didn’t get where you are because you were blessed with a pen in
your hand. There was thousands and thousands of hours of effort that
was put into it. I hope that that’s what people can see. This is not
just dreams. You can learn a lot from NBA guys. Because, for you to
become a writer or me to become what I do, it sounds kind of normal.
But for a six year old kid that lives in New York that says, “You know
what, I want to be a NBA player,” there’s 500 million other kids that
say the same thing.
But each one of these kids made the right decisions, went to
the right schools, made the right sacrifices and put themselves on the
line and now they sit in the NBA. I think we can all learn a ton from
watching these guys.
I think in many ways, it’s very empowering to be around them,
because no dream sounds funny. If you tell me you want to be a juggler,
I say, go for it. The funniest thing is a six year old kid going, “Mom,
I want to play in the NBA,” and she says, “Well so do the 3,000 other
kids in your neighborhood and the 35 million kids in the U.S. and the
25 million kids in Lithuania.”
But think about how hard it is to be in 10th grade and decide you’re
going to move 1,000 miles away to go to an all boys school in rural
North Carolina, all because your dream is to play in the NBA. How many
kids make that sacrifice? That’s why I have a lot of admiration for
them in many ways.
I
heard a quote by you: “Sometimes I hear that guys are in the gym for 12
hours and I think to myself, ‘You just wasted 11 and a half of them.’”
Idan: Absolutely, because I know my stuff – I’m not the bionic
man – but I know if you do my stuff for 75 minutes that you can do
anything else. I’m happy to put you on the phone with Jason Richardson,
or Melo or Chris and they’ll tell you. And it’s not like I’m running
them through quicksand, you know what I mean? It’s just real efficient
game-speed type stuff.
So when guys are like, “Yeah, I’m in the gym for nine hours,” I’m thinking, “Man, what are you doing for nine hours?”
Which
I have to believe makes you appealing to a guy like Melo or Chris Paul
that has all these off the court obligations, because they can max out
their time with you.
Idan: Absolutely, because you don’t need that much. It’s like
the law of diminishing returns. Do it right, do it the right way for
75-90 minutes and then, leave. It’s like sitting and studying with the
TV on. I don’t think you get that much studying done. But if you put
yourself in the bunker for an hour and you focus, you can probably get
through all of that material.
Ambo Suno