Relentless

The Suburban on the West Side

A black Suburban pulls up to a gym on the West Side of Chicago at ten o'clock at night. The man who steps out is in the middle of an NBA playoff series. Less than seventy-two hours from now he's supposed to play game three. He limped off the court the night before, told reporters he was fine, and then secretly chartered a plane and flew two thousand miles to find one person. His coach doesn't know where he is. His general manager doesn't know where he is. His teammates think he's at home icing his knee.

The knee is fine. The problem is in his head.

Tim Grover meets him at the door. They work for a few hours. They don't talk much. Grover watches the way the man's shoulders sit, the way his eyes move when he's listening to himself instead of his body. Before the player gets back in the truck to fly home, Grover gives him one instruction. "Don't think. You already know what you have to do, and you know how to do it." The player nods once. As he climbs into the Suburban he says, more to himself than to anyone, "We've just been to Oz."

That story is the entire book in miniature. Tim Grover has spent his career training the most famous basketball players on earth, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, Hakeem Olajuwon, and his central claim is that what separates the very best from everyone else has almost nothing to do with the body and almost everything to do with what happens between the ears. Relentless is his attempt to name the trait that the great ones share, describe the thirteen sub-traits that make it visible, and convince you that the same trait is sitting inside you, waiting for you to stop talking yourself out of it.