“You have a dark side that refuses to be taught to be good.” -Tim Grover

Day 8 of the Relentless 13

Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Kobe Bean Bryant. Larry Legend. Magic. Those names are synonymous with the above quote.

This is not to say you need to be “bad”, well actually yes, you need to be bad. You need to feared. In sports you need to be the VILLAIN not the HERO.

To be a champion you need to be the player or the team so polarizing you are either loved or hated.

This is a hard thing to teach and harder to coach. When you have a player on your team like this you love it, when it is an opponent you hate it. You often complain by saying “They’re cheap”, “Dirty”, etc.

But there is a fine line between cheap & dirty and being bad & ruthless. The Detroit Pistons of the 90's were villains, they were ruthless.

Cheap is hitting you in the back after the whistle.

Ruthless is slamming into the front of someone, “drawing first blood” as Bob Huggins likes to call it, with all your energy and strength when a shot goes up. Desperately going after that rebound, or at least making sure as hell the other guy doesn’t get it.

Because one rebound could be the difference between second place and heading to the finals. Just ask Vlad Divac.