KOBE for THREE

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In light of oil spills that threaten the livelihood of shrimpers and fishermen basketball has a way of paling comparatively and yet offering solace of escapism. With that said, not to use the recent gulf coast catastrophe as pun but, let’s open a Kobe can of worms. It’s a small can.

People hate the dude. He came in third in the MVP voting this year behind virtually undisputed Lebron James which makes sense but he followed young thunderous talent Kevin Durant. And it got me thinking about how somehow the prodigious Kobe Bean Bryant has managed to only capture one MVP in his entire career. How is that? Is he not the one guy that every single general manager, coach and NBA franchise has wanted for the last ten years? Was he not the guy who, despite his slow but noticeable physical decline, was still the go-to guy for recent All-Star games and Team USA in summer 2008? He has four championships of which he was not just a crucial cog but the very life blood. He’s the closest thing we’ve seen that resembles Mike and yet he somehow gets the after thought treatment.

It’s almost as if he’s mistaken for the Lone Wolf who needs neither accolade nor approval. It really is peculiar in a world and more specifically an industry where character traits are only as important as the dollars to which they correlate. People are very quick to remind us all how Kobe cheated, was momentarily the subject of a criminal investigation, so-on and so-forth. But other notable athletes have been down similar pathways and enjoy more unscathed recognition than Kobe. Kobe is the guy that people love to talk about on Monday mornings after Sunday afternoon heroics but I’m not convinced the NBA itself really understands how rare a specimen he is. I guess this time around it peeks my interest because when everybody was geeked on #23, I didn’t care so much. His Airness was just the dude people worshiped and I was so busy missing the bandwagon that I didn’t even stop to see if he was worth the ride. Kobe with all of his controversy, stoicism, egocentricism, etc. is still a game changer with a capital “G” to replace the small one I used. He epitomizes grit, determination, toughness, and the work ethic of a soldier bent on conquest. Seriously, he is those things. But I guess he’s just not MVP material more than one time in 14 seasons.

NBA…Where GET UP or GO HOME Happens.

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I love the perception of limitation as opposed to actual limitation. I mean the NBA playoffs is a great example. There’s no real rest for the weary, no extended reprieve after a grueling first-round series with the Oklahoma City Thunder and no subsiding of expectations from fans. The latter is particularly true here in LA where I’ve never seen the Staples center crowd resemble a literal sea of Gold because everyone wore the same color shirt in honor of unity and unmitigated support for the home team.

The limits of human performance, human capacity for injury and human threshold for mental/emotional/spiritual strain are tested during the course of a season that begins in October and ends officially in April. But then the elites, the cohesive and the peculiar find resolve to play past 82 games. If you’ve ever done anything to fatigue and been exasperated in addition to exhausted then you know that limits can become palpable to a degree that such limits stand in front of you with one palm extended your direction as if to say, “You shall not pass.” Take the Denver Nuggets who surged throughout this past season and threatened to derail the Los Angeles Lakers if they faced them in the post-season. This band of phenomenal athletes met an unexpected but true limitation when coach George Karl was forced out of commission with cancer. There was a marked change in their play following Karl’s unfortunate departure.

Is anyone built for media swarms, 9-month travel itineraries, dehumanization by superficially adoring spectators, so forth and so-on? Probably not and yet NBA players still in competition in May are finding it within themselves to play that 89th and 90th game  game. Am I the only one who wonders about the source from which such fortitude stems? Despite the mystery that is post-season play, one given fact is that the perception of limitation is not always an accurate rendering of human capacity.

NBA Playoffs…Where NO EXCUSES Happens

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I love the perception of limitation as opposed to actual limitation. I mean the NBA playoffs is a great example. There’s no real rest for the weary, no extended reprieve after a grueling first-round series with the Oklahoma City Thunder and no subsiding of expectations from fans. The latter is particularly true here in LA where I’ve never seen the Staples center crowd resemble a literal sea of Gold because everyone wore the same color shirt in honor of unity and unmitigated support for the home team.

The limits of human performance, human capacity for injury and human threshold for mental/emotional/spiritual strain are tested during the course of a season that begins in October and ends officially in April. But then the elites, the cohesive and the peculiar find resolve to play past 82 games. If you’ve ever done anything to fatigue and been exasperated in addition to exhausted then you know that limits can become palpable to a degree that such limits stand in front of you with one palm extended your direction as if to say, “You shall not pass.” Take the Denver Nuggets who surged throughout this past season and threatened to derail the Los Angeles Lakers if they faced them in the post-season. This band of phenomenal athletes met an unexpected but true limitation when coach George Karl was forced out of commission with cancer. There was a marked change in their play following Karl’s unfortunate departure.

Is anyone built for media swarms, 9-month travel itineraries, dehumanization by superficially adoring spectators, so forth and so-on? Probably not and yet NBA players still in competition in May are finding it within themselves to play that 89th and 90th game  game. Am I the only one who wonders about the source from which such fortitude stems? Despite the mystery that is post-season play, one given fact is that the perception of limitation is not always an accurate rendering of human capacity.

ISOLATION AS ART

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Working alone, in isolation might be the greatest separator that distinguishes average from exceptional. Take note that I tend to laud my latest insights as “the greatest this or that”… You’ve been warned. I got a little “Captain Obvious” in me.

At any rate, I’ve always struggled with working alone even when the work has to do with my most invigorating activities. It’s hard for me to concentrate and before you blame it on the ADHD for which I’ve never been tested, you must know that my mind races before sleep, upon waking, even with the glimpse of a pictures that rouses nostalgic sentiments. The sound indicator that informs me of an incoming email or an instant message can be akin to a mild earthquake that shifts my entire focus from the necessary quadrant of work to the urgent but unimportant realm. And so the natural remedy would be quiet and yet the silence can be deafening for me as my mind creates that noise. You know how it is. There’s the tumultuous internal monologue of figuring what should be done first, last or at all…

“I didn’t write today’s blog post, but what about the Bible you meant to read this morning, Dude is your business plan done, oh…you told that client you’d call her back, should I do P90X today or go to the gym and rehab my knee, how’s the summer work lookin’, how in the world are you going to finally get the curriculum and book done…”

Mental mayhem is a euphemism. Then there are those moments of peace where the chair feels just right, the silence has turned from foe to friend and the thoughts are fluid. And just at that moment, my wife arrives home from work assuming I’ve been working hard all day when in fact I’ve been working hard just to clear the debris that impedes an orderly procession of ideas and activity. The upside is tremendous if you get this working for yourself and by yourself thing figured out. What works for you?

THE LAKERS ON “TAKING SHAPE”

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Adaptability is an unsung virtue is it not? The Lakers exhibited a willingness to deviate from the script on Tuesday night and ad lib with Kobe “Bean” Bryant setting the table for other players and posting a mere 13 points on 4-9 shooting. He had 7 assists and the Laker Bigs (Gasol and Bynum) were able to impose their will. It was fun to watch the most valuable player of the last five years, unofficially, value alternative thinking over ego.

Even the engineers who design earthquake resistant bridges pride themselves on flexibility in the structure. You can’t fight an earthquake, so there is a bridge under construction in the Bay Area of California that gives some six feet in the event of “The Big One”. It moves with the quake I am told and the give and take is clearly what sets it apart from its rigid ancestors. But enough pseudo-science talk. If there is a character trait to be heralded, even coveted it is adaptability.

Games, especially the playoff variety, are not played on paper and have little to do with vital statistics like height and weight. Years of experience mean nothing either unless those thousands of minutes played by Laker veterans can materialize as corporate efforts to stop Russell Westbrook’s lightening quick slashes. Adaptability starts with an admission that perhaps the prowess I once had I no longer possess. Alternative thinking is the proverbial other way to “skin a cat” (strictly an idiom BTW). Knowing how to adapt is a posture more than it is a skill. It is a mindset of being married not to one formula but rather to the divine insights and ingenuity required to create innumerable formula for today’s problems.

RALLY POINT

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“The commissioner’s decision to suspend me speaks clearly that more is expected of me. I am accountable for the consequences of my actions. Though I have committed no crime, I regret that I have fallen short of the values instilled in me by my family,”

Roethlisberger said in the statement…

I like this quotation from big Ben Roethlisberger, especially the portion I bolded. And it’s not a backhanded sort-of sarcasm through which I malign a public figure. I genuinely like the quote because at face value there is a core recognition that no matter what loopholes exist absolving me of guilt, I “sandbagged” this one. It’s like when people applauded my B when I knew I could have gotten an A. Even worse, it’s like the papers I got A’s on in college when I knew I had written them only hours earlier loading them full of lofty vocabulary to throw professors or their TAs a Red Herring. Ben like humans everywhere struggled, no doubt, with his quick success, fame and literal fortune. But there is a refreshment in hearing an icon, even if only due to brokenness, admit that, “Hey, I should be better than this because I was raised better than this.”

Fall from graces often precede a prodigal son-like return to core values. Esteeming the development of the WHOLE athlete is usually ridiculed as the stuff of idealism as if to suggest that Ben or Tiger are anomalies, rare instances of being caught that in no way necessitate a stoppage of immoral behavior. It was on the radio the other day during “The Herd”, Colin Cowherd’s morning show on 710 ESPN. The subject was drafting a character guy in the NFL instead of looking purely at whether or not a guy can give you the goods on the field. The conversation definitely favored the goods over the character as if the two were mutually exclusive. And maybe right now they are but why is that? Could it be because when a great talent is discovered, he/she is coddled and paraded as super human? Could it be that many great talents start out as character/performance guys only to have character stripped from them because the “handlers” deem it superfluous…I mean unnecessary (college vocab coming out). See, maybe the Ben, the Tiger, the Allen Iverson, etc. we see today isn’t the real guy but merely a portion of him who has been taught to cater to one component, the one the industry values most.

THE BOND THAT BECKONS

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You can’t always see the difference you’re making if ever but you can sense when your attempts to make an impact are aimed in the right direction. With the help of some friends, I conducted a mini-camp at Sierra Vista High School this past weekend for about 25 basketball players, most of them high school aged. The kids were predominantly Latino but almost all of them non-whites. There wasn’t a rich kid in the gym but these athletes were early on both days, devoid of excuses and gluttons for working hard. It was like nothing I’ve seen and at the same time what I’ve come to expect from the Dons of Sierra Vista. Talk about talent deficits all you want but I’d rather talk about fearlessness and the hope I saw this weekend as I talked about character pillars like motivation and integrity. We had two emphases on Saturday and Sunday: #1 Check your motives for why you do everything and #2 Be the same everywhere, honest, responsible and committed to improvement. That was it and they got it. Words fail as usual with anecdotes about special kids from whatever side of the tracks people might say they come from. I don’t care about train tracks though. All I care about is that these kids never stop showing up early, barreling through adversity and competing until coach kicks them out of the gym.

How do you teach tenacity to teens who excuse themselves to go throw up during a workout and slide back into the gym undetected never making light of their momentary lapse? I got hugs from each and every one of the 25 when it was all done. We took pictures and played some 5-on-5 on the days kids are supposed to be anywhere but at school. It doesn’t take long to form a bond with a group of people when you feel called to them and vice-versa. Man I’d do this every weekend if my wife permitted and if I thought it would help unleash the attributes already housed in the heart of extraordinary individuals from cities like Baldwin Park, California.