UCLA

Although the decline of newspaper book review sections is just a sub-set of the larger sadness of the overall demise of newspapers, I was struck by the recent report of the mighty Los Angeles Times Book Review being stripped down to practically nothing.

I haven’t read it for years, but this news made me think about a time when book reviews in that paper were important to me.

Something over 40 years ago (wow!), I was an undergraduate at UCLA fortunate enough to take a bunch of courses from Robert Kirsch, who was then both the Book Review Editor of the LA Times and the daily book critic. Kirsch wrote six daily book reviews a week and edited the Sunday section. He also taught a course or two each quarter at UCLA, assigned more writing than any professor I ever had, and put more editing and commentary marks on the stuff we turned in than any other professor did too. He also clearly had plenty of time to have fun.

Obviously, there had to be a trick to it.

Kirsch explained to one of our classes that he had invented a speed-reading technique for himself in the early 1950s before he had ever encountered Evelyn Wood. The key, Bob said, was that you had to stop “silently reading aloud”, effectively articulating each word to yourself (as we all did, he said) as you processed it. He said if you put your hands to your throat you could feel yourself doing it. Avoiding that, he claimed, allowed you to pull in whole sentences and paragraphs at a time.

I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me. I always read “word by word” and still do. But Kirsch read at a speed that I would call “scanning” (his eyes moved over the page) and he turned pages like a person who was looking for something that would stand out. (Let’s say you were looking for a series of capitalized words on a written page: “United States of America” or “American Civil Liberties Union” and think about how fast you could scan text and be sure you weren’t missing that.) But he remembered everything he’d read.

(Years after I left school, I met my wife who reads in these chunks the way Kirsch did. I always finished every reading test I ever took before time was up; Martha reads narative books about 2 or 3 times as fast as I do. She’s not as fast as Kirsch and she didn’t consciously “teach herself” the way he did, but she also does what I just can’t get: she reads in chunks, rather than word-by-word.)

Kirsch loved writing those daily book reviews and teaching the classes, but he hated the admin involved in being the book editor. So around the time I graduated from college, he took his best student from UCLA, Digby Diehl, and made him the Book Review Editor. (I am deliberately not checking this story with Digby — with whom I have a friendship that goes back to those days — prior to posting but I’m going to tell Digby about the post and invite to “revise and extend” my remarks as he sees fit as a comment.) Kirsch once, in a weak moment, said I was the best (or maybe he said “one of the best”; I didn’t have hearing aids yet back then but needed them) student he’d had, but I wasn’t old enough to be considered for the job. I wouldn’t have been as good at it as Digby was anyway.

The first course I took from Kirsch was on “Criticism” and the first assignment he gave us was to write “Your Critical Credo.” What are your rules for yourself when you write criticism of literature or movies or art? What are your standards? This was typical of Kirsch, assigning you something that forced you to think about how you think.

Another assignment that stands out in my memory was a movie review we did for his class. Bob arranged for us to see a movie screening of a Campus Christian Crusade film called “Up with People”. We saw the film in an evening screening and had to turn it our reviews at class the next day, just like real film critics!

A number of us stayed in touch with Bob Kirsch after our college years. I remember an assignment he had in London in the early 1970s and recall his pretty and youthful and blonde wife wearing a leather skirt she had bought on Carnaby Street in London (according to Bob.) We lost him far too young; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the late 1970s. Even the nature of his death, as it was told to me, bore his special stamp. When he got the diagnosis, he and his wife moved to a beach cottage in Santa Barbara where he lived out his few remaining weeks without treatment or any fanfare. He accepted reality. I think that was a hallmark of his intellect.

Of course, the realities of Kirsch’s time didn’t include disappearing newspapers and disappearing book review sections covering a disappearing trade book business. But I can only begin to imagine what he would have done with digital reading. Plenty, I’ll bet.

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The sui generis Malcolm Gladwell wrote a provocative piece in the May 11 New Yorker, “How David Beats Goliath”, that demonstrates that the underdog can often win by adopting an unconventional strategy. The examples were numerous, and included Lawrence of Arabia, but the central point-maker was a girls basketball team. Their coach, an Iranian national who was not terribly familiar with basketball, couldn’t understand why basketball teams were routinely coached to simply allow the offense to bring the ball into the forecourt, essentially not defending about 70 feet of the court’s 94 foot length.

Gladwell explained the near-irrefutability of the coach’s logic which was underscored by the team’s success against much more skillful opponents. (They made it to the finals of the state championships before they lost and, according to this article, the referees working on their opponents’ home court were largely responsible for that.) And he did a bit of research, relying heavily on an interview with longtime pro and college coach Rick Pitino to get some historical perspective and to understand how the fullcourt press strategy worked at higher levels of the game.

Pitino had been a scrub guard on the University of Massachetts basketball team that had Julius Erving, the immortal “Doctor J”, as its star player. UMass had been defeated by a scrappy but presumably inferior Fordham team in 1971 because Fordham used a fullcourt press and disrupted the better team’s offensive flow. That Fordham team had a star forward named Charlie Yelverton who was about 6-foot-3, nowhere near tall enough to play that position on most successful college teams. But the press mitigated the height disadvantage.

A few years later, Pitino was a young coach at Boston University and used the press to get the team into the NCAA tournament, an unusual event for them. Pitino has made a career of using the press successfully at Providence, the University of Kentucky, and Louisville. But, oddly enough, as Gladwell notes, nobody else has.

All of this demonstrated, to me, that research is great, but you can’t beat a long memory unless you do all the research. And my long memory beats Gladwell’s research with Pitino.

The first coach to use a tip-off to final buzzer full court press as a staple tactic was John Wooden, undoubtedly the most successful college basketball coach of all time. Wooden had been the coach at UCLA for 15 years when he put the press in for his UCLA teams, which also lacked height, for the 1963-64 and 1964-65 seasons. These were the first two UCLA championship teams. And they beat presumably superior teams from Michigan and Duke to win those championships.

It’s too bad Gladwell didn’t know this, because the Wooden history confirmed and validated his “David and Goliath” paradigm. Those first two UCLA champions were, indeed, “David”s. They lacked height and conventional basketball star power. They needed to change the tactics, as Gladwell says Davids do, and the press worked perfectly for them. They made use of the unique talents of 6-foot-5 Keith Erickson (who was a star volleyball player in the basketball off-season), making him the roving backstop for their press. Erickson’s quickness and jumping ability frustrated opponents who tried to beat the press with a long pass.

But the success of those two UCLA teams led to Wooden being able to recruit far superior talent to UCLA in the future. In 1965, Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) arrived on the campus and, from then on, UCLA was Goliath, not David. (By the way, fellow freshman Mike Shatzkin arrived on the campus at the same time, which is how he knows all this stuff so well!) Wooden gave up the press as an all-game tactic and won 7 championships in 8 years by more conventional means.

So it turns out that Gladwell’s entire case could have been proven with one example: John Wooden at UCLA.

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