To be in a Flow state is to be in that moment where you lose all concept of time and become engrossed in the activity at hand. It is that moment when you even lose your awareness of yourself. Many artists, writers, and creative types concur.
Flow state is also accessible to athletes. It becomes this meditative state that players competing in a sports game may find themselves in – totally attuned to their skills, and to their teammates. After all, sports are about being entirely in the moment: embodied, focused, and highly aware.
On this episode, Adrian does a solo interview with Drew Cleary. Drew worked as a Strength and Conditioning Coach in the NBA for 18 years. In his career, he has worked with over nine Hall of Famers and personally trained athletes like Scottie Pippen and Monica Seles.
Enjoy!
Highlights
- Working in the NBA
- Coaching Flow State
- Scottie Pippen Stories
- Veteran Mentorship for Rookies
- Changing Attitudes Toward Mental Health in Sport
Resources
- Flow State: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Chelladurai’s Leadership Scales
Listen:
An Original Poem Inspired by This Episode
Full Transcript
Adrian
Drew, welcome to the show.
Drew
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Adrian
Yeah man I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation with you so we can talk hoops, performance and life in general. But actually one thing I never asked you personally is from one basketball fan to another, when did you first develop your love for the game? You know, what was that like when, I’m assuming it was early in your life?
Drew
Yeah, I’m from Australia originally. I grew up in a very small town, about 30,000 people south of Sydney in Australia and I was a soccer player when I was a little kid and um, every team in Australia, every town has their own home team and that team has an American or two on it. And so there was an American that came out at the time I was about 11 or 12, his name was Dennis Caron and he lived with my family for a year and had a profound influence on me making me have an appreciation for basketball. My mother and father were involved in basketball, but I played soccer and he lived with us and he became like a big brother to me and that’s kind of what turned me into loving basketball more than anything else was, you know, I have two older sisters but I didn’t have any brothers and it was like a bonding experience for me to have this person in my life and that’s kind of how I got started into basketball. I gave up soccer and started playing basketball and then when I was 18, I got a scholarship to come over to the United States and play basketball. That was kinda where I got my start and how things come to evolve for me.
Adrian
That’s awesome. So he was clearly one of your heroes or mentors growing up. What was the age difference? How much older was he?
Drew
He would have been in his 30s at that point. Um, you know, when you’re a little kid, you know, you don’t really, you don’t understand that you’d like to play golf. And uh, I played a lot of cricket and so I was a wicket keeper in cricket and so we had this big field next to the basketball stadium and he would go out and bring these golf clubs out there and he hit golf balls towards me and I would catch the balls with my wicket keeping gloves, you know, probably probably child abuse today, but you know, they’d be these balls flying out towards me and I would catch the balls and put them in a bucket and collect the balls. It’s like a little brother, you know, like, just happy to be along for the ride and you know, he found ways to include rather than exclude me like saying “get lost a little kid” , you know, he was very friendly and you know, to the point where he was, he’s always remained in my life. I recently spoke with him we haven’t lost contact. He’s always been a piece and a part of my life. Not just my life, but my family’s life. He lives up in Vermont and I went up, visited with him a few years ago and I know his kids and his wife and it’s a relationship that’s lasted several decades, obviously 30 years. It’s a, at least a 30 year relationship. So, very influential on me and the reason that I went into basketball for sure it was because of him.
Adrian
That’s beautiful. So you were playing basketball in college and I guess at what point did you set your focus on working in sports because you later went off and did a masters in sports science. And so when did you know you wanted to get into the field professionally?
Drew
Oh, I didn’t really know to be honest with you. I never.. I came to the United States with obviously with the aspiration of playing in the NBA because every kid thinks that he can play in the NBA, you know, like, I know there was an assistant coach that I work with in the NBA told me one time that every kid that starts at a D1 program in the United States right now thinks he can play in the NBA. Well, there’s like 300 D1 programs, so that means there’s 1500 kids today that think they can play in the NBA when this 60 slots in the draft, you know, of which 15 are going to be foreign, you know, like the probability of you planning the NBA is astronomically small. But you know, I came with aspiration but I’m never really had a inkling of playing in the NBA. Like once I started playing in college I realized that I wasn’t going to be a pro and education was going to be important, but I enjoyed the training component of it. The performance component of it. Really the most… the point in my life where it turned was when I was finishing my master’s degree at Boise State University and my father who was a president of a university in my hometown, a very influential person in my life, had two PhDs and education was a big part of his life. We had a phone call, I had a phone call with him one day and I was confused. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and, and he had always told me when I was a little kid that if you can turn your hobby into your occupation you’ll never feel like you’re going to be at work and if you never at work then it won’t feel like a job. And so he had said to me, I’ve always told you from the time you were a little kid, you know, like you need to turn your hobby into your occupation and you know, like, I’m going to ask you a couple questions, like, what do you like to do? I said I liked to play basketball, lift weights. And he said then you should find an occupation that involves playing basketball and lifting weights and now he had no idea of anything about strength and conditioning or athletic training or sports performance or any of those things because like you need to figure out what you can do. And it was like, you know, do those jobs exist? It’s like, well you know, there’s strength coaches. He goes “if I was you, I’d start at the top. What’s the top?” I said, the NBA. He goes, “what’s the next?” I say college. “What’s next?” High school. “If the NBA don’t want you, go to college. If college don’t want you, go to high school. If high school don’t want you, you have, you need to figure something else out”. So I wrote nine letters to nine western conference teams because I was in Boise and I told them, you know, like at the time the Seattle Supersonics, the Portland Trailblazers, the LA teams, the Sacramento team, Phoenix I think was one of them. I think I wrote to Chicago. So there was one eastern conference team and I just told them my story. Uh, you know, I’m an immigrant. I came to Australia. I played basketball in college and I’m done and I have a Master’s degree in Exercise Physiology and I’d love to come work for free, you know. I’ll throw myself at the mercy of… I just want to learn the trade, you know, and, I’ll survive somehow some way because I always have been able to do that and you know, just let me come learn from you guys. And surprisingly, I got six responses from the nine teams and one of the teams that I got a response from was the Portland Trailblazers and the guy that was there at the time, his name was Mick Smith. I literally packed my stuff up within a week and just jumped in a U Haul truck and whatever I had I took with me to Portland and I started working there for free. You know, and I was only there a very short period of time. He had said to me, “hey, perhaps you’d like to come to summer league with us because it was around may or June and Summer League is around that timeframe, June or July. So maybe I was there two months. At the time Summer League was in Salt Lake City, Utah, and he said to me, you know, like, we can’t give you any money but you know, you can fly over with us and we’ll give you a per diem. Per diem in those days was like $60, which was a ton of money to me. Like I’m good. 60 bucks a day man I’m good. Now, per diem in the NBA is like $140, but I literally lived off per diem for that couple of weeks. And while I was out there, I had an opportunity to meet with the owner of the team at the time, who recently passed away Paul Allen. And then, um, he asked me if I was interested in working with a friend of his Monica Seles who is a Hall of Fame tennis player. And I said, yeah, of course. And so that’s where my career started. I was literally an unpaid intern for a couple of months and two months later I was training a hall of fame tennis player on the road with her. And that’s how my career began.
Adrian
Wow. So what was your responsibility with Monica Seles? Were you the main personal trainer?
Drew
Yeah, I was a personal trainer, she had a very well known incident at the time. She had been stabbed by some crazy guy during an event and she had sat out of tennis for a little while when she was looking to get back into shape. So through that relationship with Paul, I went down and met with her in San Diego, La Costa, very nice country club then where she was playing in a tournament. And the agreement was I train her for a week. And if she liked me, I’d stay and if it didn’t work out, I’d go back to the Trailblazers and be an assistant back there. And we kind of hit it off. And I just continued to travel with her for quite a while. It was a really fun time in my life, I got to go to all different places in the world with her. She’s probably one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met. She was, you could tell that she was a great person, not by just my interaction with her, but how the general public received her. She was was very well received by the public and the fans, you know, she was just adored like a princess, and she was a very easy person to talk to and communicate with. I really enjoyed my time with her. She was a very competitive, intense person that, you know, was very easy on the side, very easy person to deal with it. It was a great time in my life.
Adrian
What do you feel like you learned during that time working with Monica that really prepared you for the NBA because you returned back to the League after that?
Drew
Yeah. She taught me a lot of things. First of all, her skill level was incredible. Um, she could do things that you would never see in real life, you know, on the television or when you watch her play. She showed me one time we were in Atlanta and she liked to like fine tune her skills by hitting the ball against this wall. And I’d never seen anything like this. Just her ability to stand three, four feet from a wall and off the volley off the half volley and side-to-side. It was a 15, 20 minute display of hitting a ball against a wall that your jaw was just dropping. She honed those skills in a very small town in Yugoslavia. She was originally from Hungary a little town called Novi Sad. And she used to hit the ball against the garage door. Her eye- hand coordination was, you know, her ability to pick up a ball at very short distances was something special. And just her competitiveness, you know. I remember we were at the Trailblazers one time and I took it into the back and show her the video room and stuff was where they break down film and stuff like that. And I asked her just casually like, do you watch film of your opponents? And she just matter of factly was like, “no, why would I watch film of my opposition? Like they need to watch film of me.” And it wasn’t swag, it was real confidence, you know, and she had told me before, the only time that she ever really watched film was when she felt like she wasn’t playing well, so she’d break out some old tapes of when she was at Wimbledon and you know, just to see herself performing at a really high level to get her confidence back, you know.
But other than that she didn’t really break film down of anybody or watch her opposition at all. So just her competitiveness and her self confidence of who she was as an athlete. And she was unbeatable. Which translated male, female basketball, tennis. It didn’t matter. That translated into the NBA. And when you saw players in the NBA, the really good players, there was a level of confidence that they had that they didn’t see the opposition really at all. They just went out and competed at a really high level because they were really confident in their own ability. So that was one of the things that I saw that translated very quickly was just to, you know, she’s a hall of fame player, she’s a hall of fame human being and I saw that translate from her to basketball very quickly and very easily. It was something that they both had in common and one’s a man, one’s a woman, one’s in basketball, ones in tennis. But the mindset was the same.
Adrian
Yeah, I definitely want to explore that with you. Fascinated with sort of the mental edge that some of these human beings seem to have that are you know, extraordinarily. But before we go there, I kind of want to go back and just have a chance for you to describe what exactly is a strength and conditioning coach. For those that might not be familiar, what is that role? And maybe walk through sort of the day, a day in a life, you know, what it’s like during the season and what does that job entail?
Drew
There’s two distinct days. The first day obviously is a game day and if you’re not on a back to back, if you haven’t played the day before, you go in in the mornings for shoot around and contingent on you know whether you’re on the road or at home. will determine the time. If you’re at home, usually you shoot from 10 to 11 and if you’re on the road you’ll shoot from 11 to 12. In that period of time, the players come in, they don’t get taped or anything like that. They just come in and watch a little bit of film on who we’re going to play and then they go out onto the court and depending on where we are in the season, earlier on in the season you may get some shots up, but later in the season it’s really just going over your offense and then going over whatever the other team’s going to run, what you’re going to see and how you’re going to defend it. Different players you give different looks to that. There’s three different types of looks on a screen: a hard show, an even show and then a soft show like someone that can’t shoot the ball very well, you go underneath the screen on them, so you kind of encouraging them to shoot the ball. But somebody that’s a really good shooter from the perimeter, you’re gonna try and put more pressure on the top of screen and rolls and most of basketball these days, uh, uh, looks out of screen and roll situations. That’s kind of why the Chicago Bulls success was a little bit different because they ran a lot of other different stuff, but the majority of basketball is running a pick and roll situations and so they kind of really just going over personnel and how are we going to defend different personnel and different situations. They’ll show it to them and film first and then they’ll go out on the floor and kind of go through it physically. I think athletes have a desire or a need, whatever you may want to call it, to feel the sensation of it and see it physically. It’s not just showing it on video or drawing it up on a whiteboard. It’s going out and kind of feeling what it’s going to be like, not at full speed, but just to go over, just to walk through it. Then the players will leave and go home or we’ll go back to the hotel and eat or whatever you kind of on your own. And then they’ll come back in the evening and depending on who you are as a player will determine where you where and what you do in the slots of the game itself. So the game is at 7:00, the first players will arrive around 4:30 4:45 and if they’re not going to play a lot of minutes that night, their time on the floor will be earlier. And then as you get closer and closer to the tip off the players that are going to play the majority of the game or do the majority of the heavy lifting, so to speak, they’ll have slots in the court where they go out and shoot for 10 to 15 minutes, usually alone with a specific coach that works with them on their game and they get specific shots that they’re going to take in the game and they try and get ready to play. From my capacity you know, like everybody’s kind of got a different programming. First of all, you’re working on what may be deficient within their system. Uh, so there’s some form of range of motion evaluation that we’re going to try and treat some kind of compensation pattern first to make sure that your symmetric and then if you’re a player that doesn’t play a lot, then there may be some component of actually trying to build something inside you because we can put a little bit more force through you because we know that you’re not going to take a lot of force tonight on the court. Um, and then the players that are going to play significant minutes, we’re more interested in making them feel good. The range of motion component becomes important and make them symmetric on both sides and feel good about themselves. And some players will actually like to lift before the game and when I say some, the majority of players when I was in the league, like 50, 60 percent of the players that played a heavy amount of minutes, will do something in the weight room before every game. Um, some more than others, but nothing like you would visualize at a health club or anything, you know, like one set of a push, one set of a pull, some form of shoulder stuff, bicep, tricep, something for their hip and their trunk, you know. Then you know, some form of stretch or PNF or forced eccentric, something to get the tissue to cooperate. You really just trying to make them feel good. And that was reciprocated a lot, you know, in the NBA a lot of the teams that had weight rooms in their arenas would let you come in within a certain timeframe to do that work. And we would tell the players that wanted to come in like, “this is the window that we’re operating in”. And they were very good at coordinating themselves to get it in if they wanted to get it in. So that’s kind of the schedule. That’s the way it’s set up. And then, you know, when 7:00 come, 7:30 comes. It’s showtime.
Adrian
Yeah, I know in sports, you often hear people talk about how it’s 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical or whatever the, you know, something along those lines. The term being “in the zone” is often used, right when people are performing at their peak, or the flow state. This is something that you studied in your master’s thesis. Could you talk about what the flow state is and how or what seems to contribute to it?
Drew
Yeah, when I wrote my master’s thesis, I used Chelladurai’s Leadership Scales, and Susan Jackson had written some flow scales. The flow scales are from a guy called Csikszentmihalyi, who kind of documented, I think there’s nine states of flow. It involves losing yourself in something, not having a concept of time and being completely indulged into this thing. And surprisingly enough, the place where most humans experienced this, the most often is reading when you get into a book that you really enjoy, next thing you know, you look up at the clock and an hour has passed and you don’t have this concept of time. You don’t have a concept of hunger or you don’t have a concept of distraction thinking about something else. You completely indulged in the act. Whatever the act may be. And the most commonly experienced place, like I said, is reading a book. Now in sports, when you get into it, um, there is a physical component to it. Like everything feels easy physically and you don’t, like in a basketball sense, you don’t see a defender, you’re just the, the hoop looks like a 10 foot circle and you’re throwing a tennis ball into a pool basically. Like you just feeling in this very confident place. And what my master’s degree was about was I was looking at collegiate basketball players, both men and women. And I was using Chelladurai’s Leadership Scales to determine how in alignment the athlete was with the coach’s message. Were they down with what the coach was talking about or were they not down with what the coach was talking about? And then using Susan Jackson’s flow scales from Csikszentmihalyi, trying to see if there was a correlation to the players that were in alignment with their coach’s message and how frequently they experienced flow and was there a correlation to players that did not understand their coaches leadership style and were they experiencing flowing less often. And obviously that’s not rocket science to figure out which ones experienced flow more often so this human interaction, this human performance was being dictated essentially by what connection I was having with this other human being. It wasn’t something that was insular within the individual. It wasn’t me just sitting there reading a book and getting indulged into this book and experiencing this flow state. What was creating this flow state in the individual was actually a relationship with another human being and in this case that the relationship between the player and the coach. Now I didn’t delve into the relationships between all of the players, which obviously could have also had some form of influence on this psychological and physiological state in the individual itself. But, essentially what I was looking at was, how do we motivate players to experience a high level of performance, this flow state, based upon this relationship. Like what it is that we’re talking about and some of the coaching that I had seen in the past, you know, the old school coaching where you “get into somebody! Toughness!” You know, “we’re soft!” All of those things that we’ve heard in coaching. The coaches are trying to make you tougher and make you play harder. But the reality of it was players didn’t really want to respond to that. So what I’ve found in the, leadership scales was that certain players would experience flow at a higher level if they were in tune with what it was that you were saying to them and how you were saying to it, how you were delivering what the message was and how the message was being delivered. And it was really interesting to see. It’s not rocket science to think that if you’re yelling at me and calling me names and pushing me down physically and emotionally, I’m probably not going to experience high performance states at a very high level. There is a fine line between that.oObviously I. I do understand that if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna make an Omelet, you’re going to have to crack a few eggs. I get that concept. It’s not all going to be hugs and kisses. We’re not going to make it to the finish line in that capacity. There are going to have to be moments when criticism is going to be alleged at people and you’re going to have to have some form of mental toughness to take that guidance. But within the parameters of that, all of the successful coaches that I’ve seen in the end that I’ve seen in college and not individuals that berate people and talk down to them. That’s not how you have success and that. That was kind of in alignment with what the research showed that that having some form of empathy and care towards somebody was going to improve or arouse their performance sensations. I was really lucky to work with the hall of fame coach and Orlando. His name was Chuck Daly, won a couple championships with the Detroit Pistons and I clearly remember we were at home and we had lost to the Clippers who were not very good at the time. Um, and we were walking out, I was just a young guy and we were walking out of the locker room after game and he’d gone into to greet the players, you know, like after the game. It was a bad loss, you know, we had really planned on winning that game and we did not win and we did not win convincingly. And he’s like, “all right, bring it in”. You know, like “tough night tonight”, you know, “let’s bring it back tomorrow. We got a game again tomorrow and let’s strap it up tomorrow and let’s go after tomorrow”. So the players brought it in and you know, “Magic on three, ooh ooh ooh” and we left. As we walked out, I said, “man, coach, I thought you were going to yell at them. Thought you’re going to go off on him”. And he’s “like, oh let me tell you something young fella. They know they messed up. There’s going gonna be times in the course of this that I’m going to have to get into them. There’s an 82 game season and you can fire off 8 or 10 bullets a year. One game out of 10 you can fire off a bullet at them. You can’t yell at him all the time. This is not a situation where I need to yell at them. They know that they messed up tonight. They know that they made some mistakes tonight. They know we should have won tonight. This is one of those situations where you’re holding the bullet back.” It was an eyeopening experience for me to understand that you don’t have to verbalize everything. You know, they did feel horrible because as a strength coach, you’re in and around the team, you know more about the team than anybody because you’re with them all the time, all the time and they’re in the weight room and that humans want to tell you things. They want to interact with you, they want to have a relationship with you. So as a strength coach you knew more about the players and more about the team than anybody else in the organization potentially. So there was a very eyeopening experience for me to understand that you don’t always have to berate someone or tell them that they made a mistake. They know when they’ve made a mistake. So he was really good at getting the most out of people. You know, he was a hall of fame coach, won a couple of championships. He had a lot of success. I felt really blessed to have been around him and seeing how somebody at a really high level like that conducts themselves more than anything else. He was a consummate professional and did he yell at players? Of course he did. Did he get pissed off in time outs? Of course you do, but at the same time did he lift people up? Yeah. And so that’s that dichotomy of relationship that I’m talking about knowing when to be aggressive and call someone out, but at the same time know when to lift somebody up and they’re the two things that, you know, seem to be shown in research in my master’s degree that if I’m in alignment with what you’re talking about, I’ll experience peak performance more often.
Adrian
Was there ever a time when you can recall when the entire team experienced flow? So not just the individual player but as an organization almost like an organism functioning at a very high level.
Drew
Yeah, when you get on a roll. You know, I got a couple of instances on that. First one, I was with Scottie Pippin for four years as a personal trainer and I remember asking him about the ’96 Bulls one time and he told me that, because that was the year they won 72 games, and he told me that they’d be warming up, he would look across the other side of the court and in his mind he’s like, “man, we already won”. He could literally look across the court and see the fear and intimidation in the other team and it was a supreme confidence and the supreme confidence didn’t necessarily come from an arrogance or confidence knowing that we’re just better than them. It was knowing that the cohesive unit, what they had on their side of the floor was unbeatable. He talked in depth about how people like Phil Jackson, the practices was all dedicated towards running their offense. And when they got out of practice and into the game, it was just such a natural extension of what they had done in practice. You know? So they didn’t have to create anything in game because they’d already seen these things in practice. It became like a mechanism and the trust that they had for each other, which turns into a special bond. And that special bond allows you to rely on your fellow teammate at a very high level, which creates this massive confidence and ability. You start winning 8, 10, 12 games in a row. You win games just on confidence. And I experienced that with a couple of teams. When we had Gilbert Arenas in Washington, you felt confident that we were going to win because we got Gilbert. I’m talking about Gilbert in his prime. When Gilbert was rolling, you know, it didn’t matter if it was end of quarter situations, low shot clock situations. We had a guy that could score on anybody at any time in any given moment. And you win a game just on his brilliance. And then that translates into confidence into other players. And next thing you know, Antawn Jamison’s scoring 50 points and Caron Butler is getting 35 a night and all of a sudden the whole team, the thing starts to get going and start to get rolling and you start being teams just on confidence, you know, and “the other team’s getting paid too! They’re all pros too! Down the hallway”, famous Flip Saunders line. Like “they’re pros down the hallway too! They’re getting paid too!” Everybody’s good. It’s not like a team that’s only won five or six games and another team has won 20, doesn’t have any talent on their team. They got tons of talent. They’re pros too. They got drafted too. They played at a high level in college too. Like there’s nobody in the NBA that’s not playing at a high level. So it really comes down to not the physical things, but you know, the mental things. Like what drives the physical? What kind of CPU you got a your computer? That’s what it really comes down to. When you look at the anthropometric numbers of NBA players, they’ve all got really long arms. Guess what? On average 6’7″ tall and they’re 7’1″ long. They’re four inches longer than their height on average. And when you see guys that played a very high level, the Pippins and the KD’s and the Kawhi Leonards, they got extraordinary anthropometric measurements. Their wingspans are 8, 10 inches longer than their height. They got extraordinarily large hands, you know, like they have anthropometric measurements that normal humans don’t have. Not to say that they’re the things that made them successful in the NBA because a lot of, a lot of NBA players have those things, but they’re the things that separate them from the rest of the crowd. What separates you from your own, um, union, the group, the NBA players? What separates them from those groups is the brain. How do I buy into what coach is talking about? How do I buy into what the general manager’s talking about? What does our team message, how do I buy into what it is that I’m trying to accomplish? You know the teams on the front of the Jersey, but it has Jordan on the back and there’s Pippen on the back, like they own half of that jersey. What is their take on how things are going to operate. Some guys are selfish, some guys are team guys, and how do we bring all of this together and it’s a really interesting dynamic that you have from the front office to coaching to players, to the support staff, the people that are around them and travel these guys and take care of these guys. How you’re either giving to the pie or in some capacity taking away from it. If you’ve got enough guys taking out of it doesn’t work and it doesn’t take much to get it off balance. So there’s a lot that goes into it. As you know, it’s a long year. Your season starts late September and if you go all the way it doesn’t end till the end of June. That’s a long time to spend with people and it’s every day. You know, I tell people all the time, you want Christmas off? This job, ain’t for you. You want Thanksgiving off? This job ain’t for you. You want New Years Day off? This job ain’t for you. You’re going to work every single day. And you know, it’s a great job. Like my father told me, turn your hobby into your occupation. I got to work in pro basketball for 18 years. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work.
Adrian
I guess on the other side of flow, when a team is struggling, like they’re going through a slump, you know, maybe 10 games, 15 game loss, what have you seen that can really turn things around? To bring you out of the slump. Maybe from a mental aspect or from an organizational or cultural standpoint?
Drew
Um, yeah, you’re going to have to do it together. We’ll have to pick each other up. Um, sometimes you need a little luck. Sometimes you need a guy that can just get hot and sometimes a guy wins a game on his own, you know, like, which creates this togetherness like all of a sudden. I remember we were playing the Lakers in LA and Gilbert scored 60 points in LA and it was just amazing. He just won the game on his own and then the next night he scored like 50 in Phoenix. Just won that game on his own. And then that builds confidence. Like sometimes it can be an extraordinary individual performance. Sometimes the coaches can come up with a great defensive plan that really mutes someone on the opposition that was having a lot of success. Um, sometimes there’s a trade of some sort. All of a sudden you got some fresh blood in there, you could infuse new energy and bring a new view on culture to the team. There’s not just one way that you can break out of it. It’s a myriad of things that can take place during the course of a year. Because there’s so many things moving in so many different directions. You have 15 brains headed in so many different directions and that’s the biggest challenge in coaching in the NBA is to try and understand how do I get these brains headed in the same direction? How do I get them pulling for each other and if you got guys headed in different directions, it’s not successful. It can be the strangest of reasons for why things aren’t working out. You know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that we’re just not good enough because that’s usually not the case. Usually there’s enough talent. It’s just we haven’t put it together correctly or it’s too young. I remember there was a coach that I work with in Washington, he was with the Warriors. At one point he was working in the front office and he use to say to me “yeah, you know, Drew, when I was working in the front office, I used to say to the coaches at the time, ‘put the young guys in. Put the young guys in,’ And now that I’m sitting on the bench and I’m coaching, I always saying ‘put A young guy in! Because when you go to like the younger guys, like, yeah, they bouncy but you’re not going to win many games with young guys. You’re going to win with vets and guys who know how to play and when you’re in the front office you want to see those young guys evolve and when you’re in charge of it and the records on your back, it’s like put A young guy in. Sprinkle in a couple of young guys. Let’s play the vets.
Adrian
Speaking of young guys, you got to watch a lot of these essentially boys become men. I mean, these 18 year old rookies coming into the machinery of professional sports, you know, with the money, the fans, the cameras… what have you noticed are common challenges that they go through in that transition when they’re forced into the machinery of the business.
Drew
Yes, there are 19 year old guys coming in. If you’re fortunate enough to get some first round pick guys that are lottery pick guys, the chances are they’re one year college guys in there into the league, you know, they, they are young. And how, what kind of habits did they start creating? You know, if you come onto a team where there are bad habits on that team where guys party a lot and go out and they, you know, they’re into some things that maybe are not more in alignment with a professional kind of viewpoint. Then they can quickly be dragged into that life and you can, you can see guys struggle and maybe not, maybe not reach the levels that they were hoping to get to and that as an organization hope that they would get to it because they become enamored with this lifestyle, you know, so at the most important thing is to have them come in and to start to have a veteran guy that knows how to prepare and cares about his body. What he eats, what he drinks, how often he sleeps, does he work on his game? Like a lot of the things that you don’t see that you only see on the television is when, when guys come to practice in the morning, if you’re a pro, if you want to have a long career, you’re going to come back at nighttime and you’re going to shoot. And I’m not talking about pump fake one dribble, pull up jumpshot and make 500. I’m talking about going in and making 500 shots from 15 to 18 feet just to keep your touch. My time there when I was with Scottie, he would go back to the gym every night, every night, we’d be back there if we weren’t playing and making 500 shots and he wasn’t, wasn’t at a full blown sweat, but this guy, he genuinely cared about the game when we were at home just kind of hanging out and he watched NBA basketball, he watched college basketball, he was a student of the game. You know, so you’re picking up pieces of, you know, tendencies of the opposition in tendencies of the other team by not just watching them from an analytic standpoint in film sessions with coaches, but you’re, you’re watching the game at home as a fan and because the way in which he sees the game, he’s able to pick up tendencies on guys that at some point during the course of the season he’s going to play against and realize, Oh man, I know the style. He likes to go left and she’d pull up shots going left. Wasn’t necessarily something that he learned from a film session. It was potentially something that he learned from just being a student of the game. You may see a move of that somebody does and be like, Oh wow, I like that! Back that up. Let me take another look at that and put that into your game. Gilbert arrays was notorious for that. He had this whole list of different things that he would work on. And he had different names for it. The Steve Blake Crossover, you know, the Michael Jordan had big hands and he had the ability to Suction Cup the ball. So instead of crossing over and like carrying the ball, like Allen Iverson did. MJ would suck the ball up and literally like lift it and put it over into a different spot, will give what I big hands. So he would come in and work on those things and those things were picked up, not necessarily in a team environment but in an environment of wanting to understand the game from their own self. So go back to the young guys, the young guys that are coming in. Do you surround yourself with a pro that really cares about the game and watches the game and is informed on the things that he eats? And do you surround yourself with that guy or do you surround yourself with the guy that likes to go to the club and get drunk and stay out all night because the one guy will have a much more profound, successful career than the other guy will. So how do you surround yourself as a young guy coming in with individuals that care about your professionalism? That becomes really an important aspect of your development. And I’ve seen both directions. I’ve seen guys that came in with a ton of talent that got caught up in some things that ended up kind of shortening their career and I’ve seen other guys that have come in and really surround themselves with, with consummate professionals and try to learn from frozen and had great careers as a result of that. So you see both sides of the. You try to encourage guys on organizations, try to encourage guys early on. Where they put guys lockers? That’s thought out. They’ll say, we’ve got this young kid coming in like let’s put him next to Antawn Jamison. Antawn Jameson was one of the most professional guys I was around. So got a young guy, a young draft pick coming in? Put him next to ‘Twan. ‘Twan will teach you how to eat right and come in and get things working and get his treatment and do the things that needs to be done. Lift weights, take care of his body, like will do the things that are going to be required of being a good pro. So there were a lot of things. Where they sit on the plane, you know, they try to match guys up, you know, big brother, little brother kind of situation. They try to encourage guys to be together. They try to create environments where that relationship can flourish. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t for whatever reason. So it’s very important. And the NBA, the league itself has recognized that. So they’ve been, they’ve encouraged teams to continue to use veteran guys by giving teams financial breaks for signing. Those guys know it’s cheap, but assign a guy that’s been in the league 10 years to a minimum deal than it is to sign other guys that you’ve been breaks on the salary cap because they’re trying to encourage this. This mentorship, this brotherliness where we can teach young guys to be successful and the best leaders on your team are not necessarily your best players on your team. You have the guys that galvanized teams are not necessarily your best players. When I was in Washington, we had a guy, Trevor Ariza that was a very galvanizing player. He had the ability to talk to all the players on the team and play as listen to what Trevor said and and he was very influential on them. Maybe he wasn’t our best player. You know Beal or Wall and those guys were probably more productive in terms of points per game and shots taken per game and all of those things. But in terms of who had the most influence in the locker room, Trevor had a very big influence in that locker room and so those guys become very important. They become kind of foundation guys in your organization to help you be successful down the line because when something goes wrong during the course of the season, coaches and general managers can’t always fix that. Sometimes the players have to fix it themselves and when you have guys and you’d seemed like that it can fix things, then they become very valuable to your organization and if they can play there even more valuable. The less they play, the less influence they usually have. So the whole thing is kind of, you know, it’s like anything else, like a family, you know, your little brother, you got to take care of your little brother and hopefully your little brother will grow up to be a productive member of the family and the society. But if little bro is, is hanging around the wrong people, then it doesn’t always pan out to be what you want it to be.
Drew
From the outside looking in. A lot of these pro athletes are revered as gods. I mean people, fans are worshiping these celebrities. As somebody who spent years in that world, can you share about the reality of the celebrity lifestyle, perhaps like the shadow side of that world that we don’t. You know, fans on the outside don’t typically appreciate.
Adrian
Yeah. They’re humans man. There’s a lot of different instances that I bumped into in regard to that. They like to have fun. They goofy. Some of them are more serious than others, but at the end of the day they’re just people that have an extraordinary talent and what I say that they have an extraordinary talent. What I’m really saying is that they had some physical gift that enabled them to be who they are, that they spent an inordinate amount of time honing that skill. You don’t just fall out of the womb and play in the NBA. You have to put an inordinate amount of time in to play at that very high level. And with that comes this level of fame and fortune, you know, part of that is debilitating. Because you can’t really do the things that you want to do, but because you so famous, everywhere you go. you’ll know you’re revered and in some cases hounded on some level. I remember it was Christmas Eve in Chicago and Scottie had gone back to Chicago for his last year. He called me and said, come on man, let’s go buy Christmas presents at the water tower place, which is this mall in Chicago. Like “it’s Christmas Eve!” Like “you’re going to see a thousand people following us.” So he shows up and he’s got this little hat and these glasses on and I’m like, “what do you think that hat and glasses are going to do?” “If it fools one person, succeeded if it fools one person!” We went into this mall and I turned around. At one point we will build into the Sharper Image. I’ll never forget this. The security guard was like “nah bro, you ain’t coming in here” because there was like 5,000 people chasing behind us like “Scottie!!”. So the environment that he lived and he lived in a bubble. It was very hard for him to be a normal person, particularly in most cities, but most particularly in that city, you know, in that timeframe, he was a god. He was a legend and he still is one of the best human beings I know, one of the best people I’ve ever been around. Generous and caring and you know, I saw him be a big brother to several players in the NBA, like most importantly probably within the timeframe that I spent with him was the relationship that he had with Zach Randolph and Zach just followed him around like a little puppy dog. Zach was a rookie, a year in Portland. It was around 2000 when he came into the league. And, uh, what Zack was able to take from Pip was important. Work ethic, being in the weight room and taking care of his body and being the best player that he could possibly be. Those relationships become really important. The fame part of it is just a byproduct of the skill level that you have. If you’re super skillful and you’re super successful, then there’s going to be a level of fame associated with that. How that manifests, how you deal with it, you know, that becomes part of it also. So, I dunno, the fame part of it, they’re just regular people, man. They have an extraordinary talent, but usually they have that extraordinary talent because they put an inordinate amount of time. One of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that the Scottie Pippen was a great basketball player just because he was born a great basketball player. There’s no such thing is that he put so much work and I saw it on a daily level, the amount of work that he put in and I was working with him towards end of his career when he was really just trying to maintain health and wellbeing to, to continue to play in the NBA and know when he was younger. He, the amount of time and effort he put in had to be immense because the time that I saw him putting in to putting it, putting in towards the end of his career was. It was crazy. You know, he was, he was dedicated to the game and it wasn’t always about being on the floor and and shooting baskets. It was watching film and being a student of the game and loving the game. If you love the game, the game will love you back, you know, and you had an immense amount of knowledge. It was fun to talk to him about different players and different teams and he saw the game differently because he, he was somebody that had an immense amount of knowledge about the game. That itself was a great historian, uh, you, you’d say, man, this guy is better than that guy and he’d be quiet for a second and then he’d go, no, no, I need to give you 10 reasons why that guy wasn’t better than the guy that you just said at the end of like, yeah, okay. Maybe he’s right because he was a student of the game. Um, the fame, you know, dictate that the fans dictate that, you know, what, how they perceive you, how they know that’s not necessarily up to you. So you got to put the time in. That’s the bottom line.
Adrian
Yeah, that’s such an important point. It reminds me of a quote I read in a book and it’s “to over idealize is to dehumanize” somebody, right? So really treating these people like humans and last year was kind of a big year where two of the star players in the league, DeMar and Kevin Love opened up quite publicly about their mental health issues. And that’s an interesting trend that we’re seeing, you know, as they’re setting this example for other professional athletes to possibly come out and humanize the image of the star athlete because they are like everybody else, you know, some of them also are dealing with things that are not always obvious outwardly. Why do you think this is happening right now?
Drew
I think as more guys come out, you know, it’s like anything else, you get comfortable. Guys were uncomfortable talking about this. “It’s not manly!” Like “I’m a punk, if I talk about that.” “You don’t have kinks in your armour when you’re the man! I’m the Mamba!” You know, like, “I’m impenetrable, I’m Zeus!” You know, like these things that we build about guys. To show any form of weaknesses, that’s showing your underbelly a little bit. “We don’t have any weaknesses, we’re impenetrable, we’re strong”. And I think as more guys come out and explain their struggles in their life, other guys potentially will have the confidence and the capacity to come out and share some of the things that have happened to them, um, in, in terms of just mental health and not just mental health, but other things in their life that have had profound influences on, on the direction and shape of their career that, that show them as humans more than anything else. It’s more about confidence than anything else. If you’re, if you’re terrified that you’re going to be ridiculed by your peers who will stay quiet no matter what, no matter what we’re talking about, whether it’s mental health or whether it’s something in your life, monetary or doesn’t matter what the issue is in your life. You’re going to tend not to talk about the things that are going to create ridicule within your peer group. As the peer group becomes more open about things that are taking place inside themselves. I think others tend to be more confident in sharing their experience and it becomes even more prominent if it’s from an individual of high stature. When we’re talking about DeMar DeRozan, and Kevin love, these are all stars. You know, these guys are meant to be the most impenetrable people, the most indestructible people. These guys are the Creme de la creme and when they come out and say, “you know what? Sometimes I’m down. Sometimes I need therapy. Sometimes I need medication. Sometimes I have periods of time that I’ve been very difficult for me where I haven’t wanted to get out of bed and guess what? I’ve had depression.” When people come out and a confident enough to share those experiences and they are. People are very high levels of gives other people confidence to come out and do the same thing and and, and share their experience, whatever it may be. So the more it happens, the more I think you have a free flow of information and hopefully our society will, will begin to less demonize it. You know, guess what, you do go through tough times in life and how you respond to those times and knowing that those times will will always be a part of you, has shaped who you are and how you respond to things later in your life will dictate how you’re able to deal with those things in and having a peer group and a group of individuals around you that are supportive of view and understanding of what’s going on. It’s less likely to have a disastrous effect. Whether it, whether it be through suicide or homicide or whether it just be through the inability to perform at a high level anymore and through anxiety, you end up not being able to play anymore. Creating these mental states that you can’t play anymore. So I think it’s very important for the peer group to recognize that these states exist and everybody goes through it. There’s points in your life where people pass away and your family and people leave your life. Whether it be through divorce or whatever reason it is, that people leave your life and how you deal with those things. Become really important.
Adrian
Yeah, I mean you’re pointing towards the importance of accepting the messiness of life. I mean just normal human life.
Drew
Yeah. Not just the messiness of it, just that no matter who you are, you going to deal with stuff, you know, and so being able to accept that those things are going to be part of the story and how do you respond to those things. That’s important because it’ll shape who you are as a person.
Adrian
What was some of the best life advice you’ve received while working in the NBA? You know, something that transfers to everyday life.
Drew
Um, yeah, like the, like I touched on before with my dad there, the turning your hobby into your occupation is probably some of the best advice I ever got. Um, you know, start at the top, you know, if you believe that you’re good at something, then pursue it at the highest level, whether it be through, I’m trying to get an internship or starting your career at the highest place, but indulge yourself in whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish at the highest level. And read as much about your occupation or whatever it is that you love, that know as much as possible. You never know when that information is going to come in handy at some point, whether it be, you know, sharing a live situation with somebody that draws them closer to you, that then makes them think, you know what? I really liked her. I’m going to go spend some more time within which turns into that athlete coming into the weight room and wanting to spend some time in the weight room like maybe it was a conversation that you had with someone, a life experience that you had with someone, a human interaction with someone that helps you generate a more positive attitude from that person towards you that makes that person want to be around you. Try to know as much as you possibly can about your occupation and and you’ll learn things from the strangest of places. You’ll gather information and stories, instances from the most unusual places and try and keep those experiences within you to just share with people in our hope that you can mold the people around you and help the people around you. If you just want to be a constant giver, then you’ll have success and I think for me in the NBA, the reason I survived so long was my relationship with the players. The players were surrounded by people that wanted to take from them, whether it was money or tickets or autographs or jerseys or shoes. A lot of people tried to take from them and my objective, the whole time that I was in the NBA was to be a giver and to give to them like, I want to help you take care of your body. I want to help you make more money. I want to help you get along the contract. I want to help you be a better player. I want to help you make more jump shots. I want to, I want to help you. There’s nothing that I want to take from you. I don’t want your money. I don’t want your autographs. I want to help you be better. Be a better person and be a better basketball player and I think that enabled me to stay around in the NBA longer than most we we’re able to because because I gave to them unconditionally and if you give to people, then it will give back to you, so that’s probably the best advice that I could give to people to try and turn your hobby into your, into your occupation, trying to learn as much as you can about your occupation and really live your life as much as you can in whatever that thing is that you love and then unconditionally give to people. Try to help people in as many ways as you can because the people that you see on the way up are the same people that you’re going to see on the way down and if you’re mean to people, they’ll be mean to you. If you give to people in times of need, those people were genuinely give back to you and it will help you stay afloat and it’ll help you cruise through life. You have a brilliant life. If my life ends tomorrow, I have no regrets. You know, I came from a very small town in Australia and got to play college basketball and spent 18 years in the NBA, worked with nine hall of famers. I have had a blessed life for sure and I think a big part of why my life was so blessed was because I tried to give to people. I try to be generous to people and that’s definitely paid dividends for me.
Adrian
It was a pleasure.
Drew
Thanks. I really appreciate you having me.
Adrian
Thanks for coming on.