Basketball: Life inside basketball's bubble

By MICHELE HEWITSON

If you could somehow see the inner workings of Tab Baldwin's brain - having first surgically removed the ever-present cap - what you would see is what "has been going on in my head for 20 years".

It comes as no surprise to learn that the Tall Blacks' coach sees basketball. But he doesn't see "players passing. I don't see bodies. I don't have a picture of a gymnasium. I have a picture of a white piece of paper with a diagram on it".

He sees Xs and Os and arrows and dotted lines. These diagrams, and he can conjure dozens of combinations, represent players on a court.

This is the creative side of coaching, this playing out of moves in his mind, and is no different, says Baldwin, "from an artist or composer. You have things rattling around in your head and you put it down on paper. You're trying to make some sense of it". It is like writing a musical score or a mathematical formula - "a mathematician could probably understand it".

A mathematician probably could understand Baldwin. His thought processes are like formulae, in that he knows that at the end of the process he will find an answer - and that it will be right.

Which is not to say that he is a formulaic thinker. You listen for a while, and if you were not listening carefully, you might think that he talked that ghastly cliche-ridden, bereft-of-thought sports twitter so beloved of motivational speakers. In fact, Baldwin hates all that. He specifically doesn't like those self-help books which are mostly written by people "preying on the weaknesses of the people that read them. Frankly, it should be free knowledge. It is free knowledge".

Last week Baldwin, who has lived in the country since 1988, became a New Zealander. That is, he went through the formal ceremony which means that when he travels to the Athens Olympics with the Tall Blacks next week, he will do so on a New Zealand passport.

For all that, the time he's been here and the way New Zealanders have taken him to their sporting heart, the way he says "we", the minute he opens his mouth he is identifiable as a product of his Florida upbringing.

His was a straitlaced, God and father-fearing sort of upbringing.

Baldwin's father is first on his list of people he "reveres" - he thinks New Zealanders are bad at revering and should work harder at it. "I revere people who have high standards." Sir Edmund Hillary (he says it in full; New Zealanders are more likely to say Ed) is on his list.

His dad was a basketball coach and "I loved him, I respected him. I liked him a lot when I got older. But when I was a kid, I didn't like my dad. He was tough. He wasn't there to be liked. He was there to do what he believed his job as father, teacher and coach was, irrespective of other people's views". He would like to be a little more like his father: "I wish I had more of his humility".

That is about as much character assessment as Baldwin will engage in. He says: "Oh Jeez, I'm not really one to assess my personality. I'm pretty comfortable with who I am. I don't worry too much about what other people think. I'm not really out to impress people". He likes to say: "I'm a pretty basic guy".

This means that he's content "coaching my team and trying to be a really good coach". That he has a simple philosophy and it is: "I love winning and I love competing and I detest losing but I know you can't have one without the other".

He lives in a basketball bubble, and it is almost an entire world. A world which "has its ups and downs and they are more related to performance than to things like image or impressions or perceptions. What I am is out there, you know, it's right there. I'm either a good coach or I'm not a good coach and my players know it. Whether the public knows it or not is irrelevant because they can no more judge me on my coaching ability than I can an astronaut on his ability to be an astronaut".

I hope all this doesn't make him sound arrogant, because he doesn't come across that way. He does have that American directness which makes New Zealanders blink and withdraw a little.

He doesn't believe in balance in life, "that's rubbish". He does believe in "the work ethic", and that there are no excuses in New Zealand for not getting a good education. He thinks that his father "probably wouldn't have wanted me to be as opinionated as I am".

It doesn't really matter what he does or doesn't believe in, because if he brings home a team with a medal, or who at least put up a valiant fight, we'll love him forever. If not, we'll judge him, even if we know less about coaching than we do about being an astronaut. He knows this.

If Baldwin wasn't a coach, if "for some reason, somebody came along and said 'ok, you can't be a basketball coach' and I was free to be whatever I wanted, I'd probably just become a commercial fisherman".

He loves fishing and it is hard for anyone who has seen him on the telly, shouting and darting about the sidelines, to imagine him being calm and quiet on the end of a line. But he is capable of a disconcerting stillness.

When you meet Baldwin he doesn't, like most people, automatically smile. He doesn't not smile to be rude. He just doesn't waste smiles for the sake of being social.

He talked for over an hour, and for almost all that time he kept his arms folded and his face immobile. In most people this would have come across as defensive, if not hostile. In Baldwin - and it took a while to figure this out - it simply meant he was concentrating hard, and being polite enough to give his complete attention to what he's doing.

He saved being friendly until after the interview. This, like the not smiling, is the opposite of what you can expect most people to do. He has a horror of hypocrisy which he believes he is "riddled with".

If he's tough on his players, he's even tougher on himself. "Where a lot of people are grey, I'm black and white, if that's what you mean." This means having standards. "I don't live up to every one of my own standards, I fail all over the place." It's hard to see but he insists: "I fail in my personal life. I fail in my coaching".

He doesn't believe in talking about his personal life. He will, though, talk about his faith. He was raised a Catholic and "I like to think that I'm a religious person so I'm pretty much guided by what is sensible and right. I'm not practising the way I should and that's wrong".

He could, he says, "Give you a tonne of excuses and none of 'em are any good. And I'm sure the Lord is up there taking note of my failings and I have to answer to that one day".

I say that I think making excuses, acknowledging being "riddled with hypocrisy" and failing is all, surely, just part of being human.

And he says: "Oh, I don't think you can deny it. But neither do I think you can use it as an excuse for failure. We are human; we fail. No question. But I fail because I am human? No. I fail because I didn't do the right thing. And I'm not afraid of failure. If we didn't lose, we'd have a really hard time getting better".

Which does not mean, of course, that he doesn't want to win at Athens. But should you see him on the street, don't wish him luck. He doesn't believe in it.