Friday, January 08, 2010
"The Ball is Gold"
Melrose's former AD Sonny Lane, a member of the Massachusetts Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame, didn't get there by accident. He coached Wakefield to a State Championship and a Division I Sectional title. One of his many sayings was, "the ball is gold." And that was in the day where the yellow metal was thirty-five dollars an ounce, not eleven hundred.
What he meant was that you win the game with possession, and you must avoid turnovers at all costs. For Lane, turnovers meant not only traveling, fumbles, three-second violations, and so forth, but poor shot selection, "stupid fouls" (make a bad play, then compound the error with a foul), and lack of teamwork.
Melrose will need to remember his admonition as they travel to undefeated Stoneham tonight, another veteran team that plays well and plays hard at both ends of the court. Young basketball players learn that the most important part of the body in basketball isn't the legs, or your shooting arm, but your head. You can beat teams with your skill, your athleticism, or your understanding and execution of what you know about the game.
A former local radio announcer, Ken Beatrice, used to say that three out of four football games are lost not won, because of turnovers or strategic errors. That can come into play when teams of similar strength meet, because the difference between victory and defeat becomes far more subtle than the usual fare, where about seventy percent of games are determined by mismatches of the above. Melrose will have to play its best game of the season to come away with a win tonight. "The ball is gold."
// posted by Ron Sen, MD, FCCP @ 7:12 AM 
