What Bill Russell and Payton Manning know about winning comes from a military training classic.
How did a 40-year-old quarterback, Payton Manning, on a 12-4 team, defeat a 15-1 team starring the NFL's 27-year-old MVP Cam Newton? The same way opposing teams felt after watching Bill Russell win eleven championship rings with the Boston Celtics. They knew they've been played.
Russell did things differently. Instead of spending time in the weight room or perfecting his own shot, he would study the habits of other players, on other teams and as well as his own. Back in 2013, Bill Simmons on Grantland wrote,
"One time, we were discussing a revelation from Russell’s extraordinary biography, Second Wind, that Russell scouted the Celtics after joining them in 1956.