The Hardest Thing you’ll ever do is tell the truth…I promise

By now any of you reading have figured out that I learned a great number of hard lessons by way of basketball or not playing basketball. I’ll explain. For me, the sport was and is a metaphor with infinitesimal applications and one of the most pronounced lessons I’ve learned in 33+ years is concerning truth.

As a child you’re punished for lying and told that liars are good for nothing. That is, unless you’re raised by criminals. And we all know about the noble exceptions where you lie to protect the innocent (i.e. the Jews during the Holocaust or slaves of the Underground Railroad). Nevertheless, playing basketball and watching it from the bench taught me about truth because there’s an unavoidable reality in which 99% of the population lives.

From probably 1989 – 2005 high school, college and professional basketball pursuits revealed the truth about myself and the realm of competition.

Concerning myself I discovered that I’m:

Driven but prone to distraction
Falsely compliant and subject to harbor bitterness when my expectations aren’t met
Not a fan of confrontation and would rather let events run their natural course
Overrun by shame when I think people hold negative opinions of me

Concerning the realm of competition I discovered that:

I don’t have it in me to cheat to even the playing field.
As a rule, the American brand of athletics breeds arrogance and will poison you if you’re oblivious.
Ruthlessness is heralded and sportsmanship’s definition changes like the wind.
Obsession with winning can make two first cousins nearly get into a fist fight.(I’ve seen it with my own eyes.)
The purest form of competition is between three “yous”…You yesterday, You today and You tomorrow.

Between the ages of 13 and 17 I ran around with a fun group of basketball junkies who exposed me to the rigors of competing. They were all older than I was and from wiffle ball to 1 a.m., 2-on-2 full-court basketball I learned the truth – that in this world you will lose often and be derided because of it. Win and it is your American right to boast and taunt. I always appreciated hanging out with those guys late at night during the summers of my adolescence but it was years later that I realized that I didn’t need to beat these older players. At least not when I was 13.

I needed to see myself truthfully for what and who I was – a novice athlete looking for validation. Everything in basketball always amounted simply to attempts at validation. I wanted to be valid, sound and just. I saw an image of a basketball player and made myself the ruler of my life, hell-bent on forcing an outcome. I wanted to be valid, sound and just as one and only one thing. That is the truth I learned. As God would have it, the same way I was punished as a child for lying is the way that life was so completely unfulfilled until I told the truth about myself, my purpose and the no-so-significant onlookers. Truth is, there’s only one audience when we compete and He is validation. Now the hard part is not telling the truth about me but more importantly getting the world to do what I’ve had to en route to self-awareness that will take the sting out of false competition.