My New Hero

This, more than anything I've come across, is who I aspire to be when part of a team or unit.

. . . Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win. . . .

Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly ­reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. "I call him Lego," Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. . . . "

When I ask Morey if he can think of any basketball statistic that can’t benefit a player at the expense of his team, he has to think hard. "Offensive rebounding," he says, then reverses himself. "But even that can be counterproductive to the team if your job is to get back on defense." It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. . . .

Last season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. "No one in the N.B.A. does that," Morey says. "No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time. . . . "

He was awkward and shy, or as he put it: "I didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth grade! I’m just trying to fit in!" And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black. "Everything I’ve done since then is because of what I went through with this," he said. "What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I’d eat lunch by myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game."

Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then he didn’t embrace the starring role. "He had a tendency to defer," Keener says. "He had this incredible ability to make everyone around him better. But I had to tell him to be more assertive. The one game we lost his freshman year, it was because he deferred to the seniors." Even when he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at will, he was more interested in his role in the larger unit. . . .

The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I looked up at the scoreboard:

Bryant: 30.

Battier: 0.

Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. "I know that doesn’t look good," he said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if Battier wasn’t in there, he went on to say: "we lose by 12. No matter what happens now, none of our coaches will say, 'If only we could have gotten a little more out of Battier.'"

Long, long article, but a really interesting read.