So, now it’s Wednesday morning and I’m driving to Birmingham airport and everything is different and it’s changing faster than ever.
Last night I travelled to Birmingham as well for the second trip to the Commonwealths (out of 4 experiences).
Last night was 3x3 basketball, all the gold medal matches.
I used to play basketball (I’m sure I’ve bored you tons of times with that before) but it wasn’t like this.
3x3 is a reinvention of basketball like T20 or the Hundred as an inventory invention in cricket or like any number of sports are trying to change their formats to grab attention to move it along and get more viewing and more interest.
3x3 is absolutely tremendous.
If you don’t know the rules it’s 1 basket on a half court and the attacking team shoots and the defending team defends and if the defending team get the ball they come outside the circle and go back in and become the attacking team.
You get 1 point if you score inside the circle and 2 if you score outside the circle and you have 12 seconds to shoot.
If your team get 6 fouls, the other team get 2 shots. If your team get 10 fouls overall, the other team get 2 shots and possession every time there is a foul.
If the match is tied after 10 minutes, it goes to overtime and it’s the first team to score 2 points who win. If you score 21 points within the 10 minutes you win, if you score more points than your opponent in the 10 minutes you win.
Got it?
Basketball used to be 5v5, the games were 40 minutes, 20 minutes each half with the clock stopping a lot of the time. You had a team of 10, 5 substitutes you could change as often as you wanted. That’s how Michael Jordon played.
3x3 is basketball on steroids.
And so, we watched the men’s and women’s wheelchair and the men’s and women’s gold medal matches and the England men won in overtime when a young guy from Birmingham scored an absolutely worldie to send 2-3 thousand people in that amazing little arena in Smithfield in Birmingham into rapture.
Grace told me it was one of the best sporting things she’s ever seen.
But the world is different now.
I’m travelling to Birmingham when I used to fly to Glasgow from East Midlands all the time.
I now have to go to Birmingham and queue for 90 minutes in a security queue even though I’m already checked in.
Flying to Glasgow is different now.
I’m off to the ITI Study Club in Glasgow to talk about consultations in an abbreviated form of our consultation master class.
Scottish audiences are interesting because change happens more slowly in Scottish dentistry.
Not for them the UDA contract in 2006, they still have fee per item and grants from the government and access to poorer places to offset the decline of NHS dentistry.
Scottish audiences are often more resistant to the doom scrolling stories of the collapse of NHS dentistry but it’s surely only a matter of time, right?
And so, basketball is different, and airports are different, and dentistry is entirely different, and they are all going to get different again.
Explaining to people in Glasgow that dentistry used to be a business that was hard to fail in and now that is changing (and in many places has changed) that understanding the process of meeting new patients into your practice in the best possible way is something that you were never taught at dental school and in general you learned ad hock as you went along.
Nobody teaches children how to run and so now, when you see proper runners running you realise how much they’ve been coached in how to run.
Proper runners get taught how to run and then practise running.
Dentists never get taught consultations (not from anything other than a pure clinician standpoint) and so they never learn and then if they do practise, they generally practise the wrong thing.
5 years from now dentistry will be unrecognisable from where it is, either you’re working your way out, developing new skills or you’re dead.
Blog Post Number - 3165