How Sherlock Holmes Made Me a Better Basketball Player by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar English professors are always preaching about how literature and art can make us better people. In my case, literature made me a better basketball player. During my first year in the NBA when I was playing for the Milwaukee Bucks, a friend gave me the complete set of Sherlock Holmes stories. I lugged them along on the team’s next road trip. I was fascinated by Holmes’ ability to see clues where other people saw nothing. It was like he saw the world in color while everyone else saw it in black and white. I was immediately inspired to apply Holmesian powers of observation to my basketball game. Certainly there had to be some way to apply Holmes’ skill in a practical way to help give me an edge. Because I kept playing the same athletes over and over, I began carefully observing their moves, their habits, and their weaknesses, cataloguing them in mental files. Of course, many athletes keep mental books on opposing players, but I wanted mine to be even more detailed. Remembering how Homes relied on his rag-tag street boys, the Baker Street Irregulars, to help him gather information, I decided to modify his approach. I began paying close attention to the chatter amongst the ball boys and other staffers. One time I overheard a couple ball boys discussing how Bob Lanier and his coach liked to smoke in the locker room at half time. After hearing that, I decided to run Lanier up and down the court as fast as I could in order to tire him out. I’d let his smoke- addled lungs do the rest. Thanks to Sherlock Holmes, the game was quite literally afoot. .