I finally get it....

I love sports. I love playing, I love practicing, I love finding myself in the game. No one really tells you how much better sport gets as you get older. I have so much more patience, I understand the flow of the game, I see the court like I have all the time in the world. Maturity is a wonderful thing in a player. I’ve lost the rush of being young, the sense of urgency to be good and replaced it with comfort in who I am and a steady drive to simply be myself at every moment.

I’m noticing the parallels between sport and life more as well. I always knew basketball was more than just a game to me, that it was a way for me to challenge myself and grow and find strength. But by dedicating myself to my sport, I’ve realized that its much more than I even imagined. Its defined who I am. Not because I consider myself a ‘basketball player’. Hardly. If that was the case, I might find that my jump shot doesn’t benefit me in daily life. And yet, my jump shot does transfer to all aspects of my life; it transfers because its about a commitment to refine a skill, its about believing in the power inside of you, its about shooting with confidence with the game on the line after you’ve missed every single shot up to that point., its about charging ahead despite the odds, pushing aside self doubt and willing yourself to continue. It’s about living and playing fearlessly, making no apologies, and refusing to define yourself by your mistakes. It’s about letting go and just being me.

I didn’t know I would find so much in being an athlete. I thought it was just about gaining confidence, learning how to win and lose, setting goals and working towards them, pushing your body beyond what you thought was possible. It’s been all of those things of course but so much more. I knew the mental aspect was huge, always knew that I beat people because I was mentally tougher, that I willed myself to win against people with more physical talent. That’s always been obvious to me. But sport has been less about these platitudes and more about facing myself. I’ve used it as a mirror to look at myself, to work on things within me, to make improvements in who I am as a person.

Because of this new clarity in myself as player, I’ve started watching sports differently. I’ve always enjoyed watching sports, not nearly as much as playing, but enough that I love spending a whole Saturday on the couch watching American football, love going to games on crisp fall afternoons not only because of tailgating and food and boys in tight pants but because I actually like the sport. I like watching competition, I like it because I can relate so well. I’ve never played football but I know exactly what the energy of the locker room feels like before they run out, I understand the urge to bang helmets together, I know why sometimes their bodies spontaneously erupt in celebration after a big play.

And so without American football, I’ve been watching a lot of soccer; so much that I actually find myself calling it football. Having played the sport myself, I can appreciate the level of skill I’m watching but its far more than that. I cheer for teams, I love watching the competition, the fans going crazy, shown praying at the end of games, the late goals, the ‘equalizers’, the nicknames like ‘el nino’, and ‘the Brazilian goal scoring machine’. The enthusiasm for soccer in the rest of the world is contagious.

But like I said, I am watching sports differently now. It’s more about the scope of human potential. It fascinates me. I watch the best players in the world and compare their journey to my own; to aspire to be the best that you can be is an amazing thing. I know that singular passion, that drive without exception. And because I know that my mind, my drive, my will got me where I am, I wonder about the same in other athletes. Some are blessed with natural talent for sure but most have that something else. I am well aware that many people can jump higher than me, can run faster, can lift more weight; many people even have better acquired skills than me and yet that seems to matter very little. I have a supreme belief in myself, a fondness for physical discomfort, abnormally low levels of a fear of failure, and a conviction that allows me to risk it all, to put myself on the line and see what happens. In fact, I have to do that. I can’t play it safe.

So I watch these soccer players play in front of 100,000 people and I know what they are thinking and feeling. I watch them succeed and fail and pick themselves back up. Last week, I watched a player on defense score on his own goal in the 93rd minute of the semifinals of Champions league, his head sunk into the grass after the play. I thought of him the next day too, knowing that his only salvation was thinking of the next game, the next opportunity for success to wash away the failure. I saw a player score a game winning goal on a penalty shot on the day his mother died, pointing to the sky after, fully immersed in that moment of elation and grief. It’s the full scope of human emotion, its life played out in 90 minutes for everyone to witness. And it amazes us.

Some people don’t like soccer because there isn’t enough scoring. I understand in a way and yet I’m drawn to the sport for that very reason. Goals are difficult, they are rare, and they are exponentially more exciting than scoring in most other sports because most every goal is a potential game winner or prevents a loss. Its like watching 90 minutes of last second shots. One defensive mistake, one unbelievable play and the whole game could be decided. Anyone who says soccer is boring hasn’t really watched close enough.

The game winning shot is the most obvious example of risking it all to win. I realize most people will never know that exact feeling, most athletes even. And yet, everyone has had a slice of that completely overwhelming emotional moment. That being said, I also think there are two types of people in the world; those that look forward to those opportunities to lay it all on the line, and those that avoid those situations at all costs. We all want to be the former and by watching those that actually are, hope to shed some light on how to get there ourselves.

So we are inspired by physical feats. And yet, we know that the mental side is even more inspiring because it relates to all of us. Not everyone has potential to run a four minute mile and no matter how much training, most people could never move laterally like Roger Federer. But intellectually we know that those feats were limited once too, that someone had to break through the barriers and witnessing it makes us challenge our own barriers. Even people who have never played sports can watch and find a parallel in their lives, can awaken a memory of their own success or failure and enjoy that commonality to those that play out theirs in front of the world.

I think most people watching sport though, don’t really understand that athletes are still just normal people. They face self doubt constantly, they have low confidence at times, that failure eats away at them. The difference is that those feelings are fleeting, that athletes have to fight through them to keep going, that there is a power greater than negativity that moves them forward. That what we see is the cumulation of many battles, that being an athlete is a journey of facing yourself to become more of yourself. I try to convey this to my teammates but I’m not sure they understand. They think I woke up one morning able to shoot 3s. But Its not spontaneous combustion; its taken thousands of misses, thousands of failures to get me to this point. And still I move forward. My mental strength wins out because I force myself to continue. Its not magic, its not superhuman, it isn’t even limited to athletes.

Being an athlete doesn’t make you special. I've learned that much. There are a lot of stupid people that play sports rather successfully and yet still have no particular skills that might benefit society outside of an arena. In fact, there are times that not being a particularly reflective person is a boon in athletics. The only thing that sets athletes apart specifically, is that they do what they do in front of a lot of people, that fans congregate with the express interest in the success or failure of athletes, that critics and journalist write and talk and pretend to be experts on the given sport. It takes a certain amount of fortitude to deal with that but it still doesn’t necessarily make us special people.

And yet, athletes are worshiped much differently than say a CEO or someone leading the pitch of a major advertising firm, they are admired far more than a single mom going back to school, or a recovering alcoholic that has dug deep into his soul and found himself. Nothing you can do on the field or court can compare to facing cancer or living in a cardboard box. And yet they don’t have to. They are the same thing. That sounds callous. Sports aren’t important because they are as important as real life problems, they are important because they are an exercise in facing challenges. What we do within the arena is the same as what we do outside it. The difference is that in that set amount of time in competition, the world watches. What we do is visible, it’s a stage, it’s a performance, and by watching us strive for greatness, people can believe that there is greatness within themselves as well. And that is what inspires us.