Conversations with Great Teachers

6. Teaching the Athletes

Teaching the Athletes 6 “My best teachers never judged me.” Tom Nordland teacher of basketball shooting Tom Nordland grew up in Minnesota, where he led his high-school team to two straight state basketball championships. The team was built around his extraordinary shooting ability, and his name became a household word throughout the state. In one championship game, he hit nineteen out of twenty free throws, a record that still stands. He was recruited to play basketball at Stanford, where his first day in practice delivered a shock to his confidence from which he never recovered. He was a sub for his entire Stanford career. After college he became a computer programmer , became interested in tennis and golf, and one day, at age fifty, during a lunch break at Apple Computer, he stepped onto a basketball court and after a few minutes, he began to swish every shot. He realized what had made him a great shooter in high school, and he began his career as a basketball shooting teacher. He teaches workshops, holds summer basketball camps for kids, and coaches individual college and professional basketball players, including NBA players. He has made two instructional videos. He is something of an evangelist for good shooting, and he is disappointed over the decline of shooting in the game. He speaks with passion and enthusiasm. My life seemed without purpose for a long time. In high school I was such a star that I didn’t develop a personality to go with it. I thought I was somebody, but if you think you’re somebody, then you’re not open to becoming somebody. I never had the personality to go out and create who I am. At Stanford, I never made the starting team. I was a failure. I had this “catch and shoot” shot—not off the dribble, just catch and shoot. At Stanford, in the first practice—I think it was in the first hour—I started getting my shots blocked, which had never happened before in high school. I had been famous in high school. I remember when I went to get my driver’s license, they said, “Oh! You’re Tom Nordland!” You know, I got all sorts of little favors and so forth. So I felt good about myself. But it all came crashing down in college when I had to work off the dribble, and when I tried to do that, I lost my 134 | Conversations with Great Teachers confidence, and then I lost my shot. Here I am, a one-dimensional player, recruited by Stanford on a basketball scholarship, and my one thing I could do well I couldn’t do any more. And the coach didn’t have the time or the interest to train me. He didn’t talk to me about who I am. He didn’t know what was going on, and I was too shy to ask. So I spent three years on the bench wondering what had happened. By great fortune, one day in 1976, a great friend of mine, a golf professional, said, “Get the book The Inner Game of Tennis.” And so I got it, and I read it the night before the state amateur golf tournament, which I had qualified for. The book said, “Let go,” and I didn’t know what that meant. So I let go right and left [chuckles] . . . I played very badly. But it started me thinking about the inner game, the mental side of life. About a year and a half later I moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles to be near the author, Tim Gallwey. I spent five years with him as part of his staff. He opened my eyes to the mental side, the inner game. He was my first major mentor. Then years later I met Fred Shoemaker, an incredible golf master. So now I’m a coach of this little thing called basketball shooting. I look at shooting and I see everything at once, but it’s just a small thing. Fred looks at golfers and sees the whole golf swing—much more complicated than shooting a basketball . We have this mind that’s crazy. Everybody has this ego—you’re you and I’m me and we’re separate, and I’m better than you or you’re better than me . . . the ego is just driving us nuts all the time. I learned that...