Mr. President’s Mind: How Shane Battier Learned to Lead (and Shut the F*** Up)
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What makes Shane Battier a unique player?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
Right after this ad.
I love when a guest has a notebook.
I do. I feel like such a boomer. I mean, I'm getting old. I'm 46 years old. I forget things. But if I write it down, I have notebooks upon notebooks of just maxims and quotes. If I put it in my phone, it's gone. You have the good kind of pen, too, by the way. That thin... The Muji pen. The Muji pen. That's right. That's veteran savvy. The finer things in life.
But I wonder if you've used that Muji pen to write down at any point the quote I wanted to actually start with, which is, of course, from Mike Krzyzewski, Coach K, head coach of your Duke Blue Devils, who said this, quote, Shane was an alien. I wanted at the end of his career to crack his head open and see if he was really human.
End quote. I think that's a compliment. Pablo, I was psycho. I was a psycho, a psychotic, neurotic person in my time at Duke.
And great steal by Forte. He'll go for two. No! What a play!
That's one of the great defensive plays you'll ever see right there, baby! When Coach K recruited me, I was part of a very talented recruiting class, number one class in the country, Elton Brand, William Avery, right? Chris Burgess. I grew up watching you guys. Right? And we were going to a team that had, at the time, 10 McDonald's All-Americans. We had 10, 10, which is crazy. So you're saying, like, why would you go to a team that has 10 McDonald's All-Americans? And Coach K, people always ask me, like, what's so great about Coach K? Coach K can peer into your soul and know what button to push. Finding the heart of the team is huge. I call it a spirit. He has a different spirit. Once we get him in our program, I have to give him some more latitude where he feels comfortable in instinctively following that spirit.
He knew this when I was in high school. So he came into my living room and he said, you know, hey Shane, I'm not going to promise you playing time. I'm not going to promise you shots. I'll promise you one thing. The opportunity to earn playing time every single day. And if you're good enough, you'll play. So he had me hook, line, and sinker. And I'm like, I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you, and I'm gonna make you play me.
You're going to stab people's eyeballs with that fine ballpoint Muji pen. I would. I would have.
I would have. I used to throw up before every game. Every game? Every game. My freshman year, I started. And literally, I'm going out to the jump ball circle. I'm so anxious. I want to play well so bad. I would run back to the bench, grab a Gatorade towel, throw up in it, throw it back out, and then they toss the ball.
And just to be extra clear about this, Shane Battier barfing his ambitions into a towel before every game as a six-foot-eight Duke freshman was a thing that pretty much everybody who cared about him found intensely unsettling, I am told. And this was true of his college girlfriend, who was now his wife, and it was true of then-Duke assistant coach Quinn Snyder, who was now the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks. Although... there was one notable exception.
I think Coach K loved it because he's like, it matters to me. He cares. But Quinn Snyder was like, this is not healthy. You cannot do this. And so he literally would like breathe with me. Breathe. Yeah, breathe. He's like, Shane, breathe, breathe, breathe.
But when it comes to barf, the first thing that I personally think about when I think about Shane, whose brain, by the way, not unlike Coach K, I also plan to just crack open here. is a different liquid. And it dates back to the first time that I ever met Shane, which was at a bar during the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference about maybe a decade ago, which would be around sometime after he played pickup with Barack Obama, which we'll discuss, and probably also around when he was just winning championships with LeBron James, who would call Shane, quote, the number one smartest basketball player and person I've been around, end quote.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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