Jerry Lucas played in his first basketball game when he was in the fourth grade. In Middletown, Ohio, his grade school only had a sixth-grade team, so Lucas played up. But he didn’t play much, mostly just practicing with the team. Finally, he got on the floor for the final 15 seconds of the last game of the season. “I loved it,” Lucas told The Athletic. “I was excited about it. And I wanted to be the best player I could be.” So after the season concluded, Lucas developed his method of shooting, based on the acronym D.A.D., which stood for “direction, arc and distance.” He tried to take around 5,000 shots a day. For Lucas, each shot had a purpose, working through the three elements he envisioned. He would practice for hours, getting kicked off public basketball courts in a Middletown park by older people wanting to play.