David and Goliath: Chapter 1: Vivek Ranadivé Summary & Analysis

Gladwell introduces Vivek Ranadivé, an Indian immigrant to the United States who lives in Silicon Valley and works for a software company. When Ranadivé becomes the coach of his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he decides to behave as he would at work—in a calm, measured manner. This is especially difficult, though, because he knows very little about basketball. Nevertheless, he knows he’ll get nowhere by yelling at his athletes and teaching them to play like other teams, so he decides to take his own approach. According to him, the way most teams play basketball makes little sense because they don’t utilize the entire court. Every time a team scores a basket, they run to their own end of the court and wait for the offensive side to approach with the ball. If a team isn’t good at defense beneath the hoop, this tactic puts them at a disadvantage. 

Ranadivé decides to coach his team to play what’s known as the full-court press, in which the defensive team puts pressure on the offensive team right away, making it difficult for them to inbound the ball. If the other team does manage to inbound the ball, then Ranadivé’s girls play tough defense on them before they even reach half-court. This is an ideal strategy for Ranadivé’s team, since the girls are inexperienced basketball players who spend the majority of their time studying. If they play the traditional way, Ranadivé knows, they will lose—a prospect he dislikes as an immigrant who came to the U.S. with only $50 and secured a successful life for himself. Consequently, Ranadivé has his team run the full-court press every play of every game, and they end up playing in the national championships.

Turning to the idea of unexpected upsets, Gladwell references a study showing that small countries at war against countries with 10 times their population end up losing only 71.5 percent of the time. This means that smaller countries win 28.5 percent of the time against much, much bigger opponents, outmatching them nearly a third of the time. What’s more, the success of the smaller countries increases to 63.6 percent when they opt not to play by the conventional rules of warfare—in other words, forced to devise their own tactics against more powerful entities, supposedly weaker nations win more often than not. This means that underdogs win far more frequently than people tend to think. And yet, the vast majority of people continue to believe that such victories are anomalous, even though it’s rather clear that so-called disadvantages aren’t always disadvantages at all.

A prime example of an underdog is T. E. Lawrence, or “Lawrence of Arabia.” Leading the Arab revolt against Turkish forces in Arabia during World War I, Lawrence was put in charge of what one British authority called “an untrained rabble.” And yet, the soldiers Lawrence led were resilient and tireless, and they were extremely knowledgeable of the terrain and area for which they were fighting. What’s more, they were used to traveling through deserts and were therefore able to cover great distances to unexpectedly sabotage a number of Turkish-run railroads and stations. More importantly, they managed to launch a successful attack on the port of Aqaba by making their way through the desert instead of approaching by water, as the Turkish expected them to do. Doing this required spending days in intolerable heat, but because Lawrence’s men were used to such conditions, this wasn’t a prohibitive problem.

The general perception of Lawrence’s men was that they were “untrained” and therefore ineffective. This presumption, in combination with the men using their specific skillset to their favor, meant they were able to kill or capture 1,200 soldiers in Aqaba while only losing two men of their own. Gladwell draws attention to the fact that, though the weaponry and resources the Turks had are indeed advantageous in a traditional sense, they aren’t always advantageous. In this case, their resources rendered them largely immobile, and therefore vulnerable to the agile and creative Bedouins. Though this dynamic has repeated itself time and again throughout history, people continue to underestimate underdogs, thinking that only conventional assets lead to success. This is the thought process Gladwell hopes to challenge.

Gladwell explains that in basketball, players have only five seconds to pass the ball in from out of bounds, so Ranadivé teaches his players to cover the person trying to make this pass. Instead of letting the offensive team easily walk the ball up the court, Ranadivé’s players cover them the entire time. If the other team succeeds in inbounding the ball in the allotted time, they then have 10 seconds to pass half-court, so Ranadivé’s girls continue to apply defensive pressure. This has a tremendous effect, as it forces the team’s opponents to run out of time, make bad passes, or randomly throw the ball. With this tactic, Ranadivé’s girls beat teams who are ostensibly much more skilled them. Simply put, the press enables them to hide their shortcomings. Because it’s an exhausting strategy, Ranadivé focuses on getting his players in shape instead of refining their traditional basketball skills.

Ranadivé’s team isn’t the only one in history to have embraced the full-court press. In 1971, Gladwell notes, the Fordham University Rams adopted the same strategy against the University of Massachusetts. At that time, UMass was a powerhouse of a team that hadn’t lost a home game for two years. Fordham, on the other hand, was “a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn,” and they were missing their center when they played UMass. And yet, Fordham won by 11 points.

Gladwell says that Fordham’s victory isn’t a particularly unique story, since there are a number of similar tales about the full-court press in basketball. However, the strategy has never caught on. In fact, the Fordham coach didn’t even continue using the press, going back to normal tactics immediately after besting UMass. Gladwell explains that people tend to turn away from the press because it can, technically, be beaten with the right approach—a team only needs to press back to even the scales. Nonetheless, the full-court press is “the best chance the underdog ha[s] of beating Goliath.” Therefore, Gladwell argues, every underdog team should apply this strategy, but for some reason, they don’t. This tendency surfaces throughout history in other contexts: for example, smaller countries frequently fight more powerful nations “straight up” and lose the vast majority of the time.

It makes very little sense that underdogs don’t do whatever they can to win, Gladwell says, but he then points out that it often takes more effort to take alternative approaches. For Lawrence’s soldiers to best the Turks at Aqaba, they had to take long detours through the grueling, merciless desert. Similarly, Ranadivé’s team has to be in impeccable cardiovascular shape to successfully execute the full-court press. It’s easier, then, to go along with convention, even if this doesn’t set underdogs up for success.

Unlike the Fordham coach, one person fully grasped the import of what happened that day in the game against UMass. His name is Rick Pitino, and he was on UMass’s bench marveling at the upset taking place before his eyes. It was clear to him that the full-court press was solely responsible for Fordham’s success, so he incorporated it into his approach when he later became the head basketball coach at Boston University in 1978. With this strategy, BU won the NCAA tournament before Pitino moved to Providence College as head coach and turned a losing team into a contender for the national championship. He now teaches other coaches how to coach basketball, and though he teaches the full-court press, not all coaches adopt the strategy—they can’t imagine working their teams hard enough to make it a viable option, since it requires so much cardiovascular training.

Gladwell calls attention to the fact that not all coaches adopt the full-court press even though Rick Pitino teaches it to them. This demonstrates that not everyone is willing to adopt such strategies. In fact, only underdogs will gravitate to such arduous approaches. In other words, people have to be “desperate” to “play by David’s rules.” To that end, a team or group must be so bad at something that they have no other reasonable choice but to reassess their approach. In this way, the fact that Ranadivé’s team is so bad at basketball is its most important asset, because it’s what compels them to play the full-court press—its greatest strength.

Unfortunately for Ranadivé’s team, not everyone approves of their methods. The coaches and parents of the teams they face are often outraged by their strategy. At one game, the opposing coach throws a chair onto the court, furious that his team—which is actually quite good at basketball—is losing to a band of traditionally nonathletic players. Gladwell points out that people associate success with traditional forms of advantage. Lawrence of Arabia, though, didn’t have respectable degrees, nor was he a decorated military general—but this is precisely why he had the courage to think outside the box. Similarly, Ranadivé knows very little about basketball and isn’t invested in the various conventions to which most people adhere, which is why he has no problem taking a new approach that enrages his opponents.

In the national finals, Ranadivé’s team wins their first two rounds. During the third round, though, they play a team on their home court. The referee presiding over the game is also affiliated with their opponents. The referee ends up calling fouls on Ranadivé’s players even when they don’t do anything against the rules. One girl is even ejected from the game because the referee continues to call unfair fouls against her. Unsure of what else to do, Ranadivé calls off the full-court press, ultimately costing them the game by forcing them to play basketball “the way basketball is supposed to be played.”