We can view "basketball" as an object, a game, or a hobby. For some it's their meal ticket - player, coach, videographer, scoreboard manufacturer, concessions operator, or information purveyor.
I see basketball as a metaphor for the pursuit of excellence and vehicle to share life lessons.
When we discuss a bacon and egg breakfast, we distinguish involvement and commitment. A chicken participates but the pig commits.
We seek fully engaged players, living words of craft, discipline, energy, sacrifice, and time. And coaches are obliged to repay with value, fairness, respect.
In The Road to Character, David Brooks discusses the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, and its impact on young Frances Perkins. 145 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a sweatshop deathtrap with locked doors and ignored safety features. Many jumped to their deaths from the eighth to tenth story floors. Brooks discusses how the fire 'summoned' Perkins to her reformer vocation and compares it to Viktor Frankl's experiences in Nazi death camps from 1942 on. In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Of Perkins, Brooks writes, "A person with a deep vocation is not dependent on constant positive reinforcement. The job doesn't have to pay off every month, or every year. The person thus called is performing a task because it is intrinsically good, not for what it produces."
Perkins found that Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a seventeenth century guidebook, resonated with her. “Say farewell to luck when winning... the more luck pyramids, the greater the danger of slip and collapse. For luck always compensates her intensity by her brevity. Fortune wearies of carrying anyone long upon her shoulders.” She believed in work, not luck, and ascended from lowly counselor to Industrial Commissioner in New York and Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt. She changed America through child labor laws, overtime laws, and a minimum wage. Some called her "half-a-loaf girl" because she understood the value of compromise.
When playing or coaching well, we go beyond Phil Jackson's "basketball is sharing". We transcend that by "serving our teammates". How you play informs the world about how you live. We are about the pursuit of truth.
