Jack’s Blog

For whatever reason, William Wesley, aka World Wide Wes, has been in the news recently.  A sneaker salesman, who allegedly sold more kicks in a bad neighborhood of Philly than other store owners in affluent areas, World Wide Wes caught the attention of some power brokers and, voila, a real life version of Where’s Waldo? came to life.

Many call this cat the most influential man in all of sports and for someone who has no “stats,” he burst on the scene like nobody’s business.  But “the most influential man in sports?”  Here’s a past blog that shows how Michael Jordan defines influence - even when you don’t have it.  This is reprinted from 8/14/07. 

As I mentioned, I spent from Aug. 1-10 at the Michael Jordan Flight School in Santa Barbara where I serve as one of the eight league commissioners (there are eight leagues of eight teams in each league).  This was the fifth year I’ve worked the camp.

Considering most of the campers (ages 8-18) don’t remember seeing Michael as a player, observing the adults is much more interesting than following the kids.  The most amazing story occurred two years ago at the tenth anniversary of the camp.

There was to be a mystery guest speaker on the third night and the speculation ran wild as to his identity.  The camp director is George Raveling.  If you’ve read my blogs, you’ll know I worked with George as a graduate assistant at Washington State in the early ’70s, as an associate head coach at USC in the early ’90s and as assistant chairman on the Recruiting Committee of which he was chairman for about 17 years in between.  During the second day of MJ’s camp, George confided in me the speaker in question was Larry Brown, recently signed as coach of the Knicks, who had a fabulous coaching career which included an NCAA Championship at Kansas and a World Championship with the Pistons.

Later that evening, I was approached on five separate occasions by parents asking me who the speaker was going to be.  Each conversation went something like this:

Parent: “Who’s the mystery guest?”

JF: “I can’t tell you.”

Parent: “But you know who it is?”

JF: “Yes.”

Parent: “Oh, come on, you can tell me (us).”

JF (looking around surreptitiously): “OK, it’s…George W. Bush.”

On no occasion, not once! did anyone question my answer.  I got replies from, “Oh, great, he’s my favorite” to “Good, that will be a great experience for my son” to “I wonder if he’ll wear shorts.”  No one ever said, “Come on, you’ve got to be kidding.”

I did eventually tell them it really wasn’t the President.  They were all disappointed, but no one ever said, “I knew you were putting me on.”

This experience reminded me of Colin Powell’s line:

“You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.”

And it explains why kids today are so gullible - it’s an inherited trait.

Human behavior has always fascinated me.  While I’m certainly not the greatest people-watcher of all-time, I’m definitely in the finals.  That includes the written word as well as actually taking in sights and sounds of individuals. 

Reading quotes from college basketball players whose teams have underachieved, but are now entering their respective conference tournaments run the gamut from false bravado to hope for divine intervention.  When they say that they only need to play to their potential for three or four games (which they have done maybe once the entire season) to get to their dream, the NCAA Tournament, you wonder who it is they’re trying to convince.  Mainly, it comes down to attempting to avoid what everyone dreads: losing - or, worse, being considered a loser.

What follows is a blog I did on 7/16/07.  See what you think and feel free to post comments. 

On a recent trip through Barnes & Noble, I couldn’t help but notice how many books are written on success - how to achieve it, how to maintain it, how to handle it once you’ve got it.  It almost makes success out to be a near certainty - read the books, follow the recipes, stay focused, don’t stray from the goal, and bingo!

Yet, if success were that simple, wouldn’t more people be successful?  In a speech I gave to the Raisin Bargaining Association some years ago, I made the statement, “No one goes through life undefeated.”  There happened to be a politician in the crowd and afterward, as well as every time I saw him subsequent to that encounter, he told me he put the card with that quote on it (I flip cards with inspirational, motivational, moral of the story, etc. quotes to the audience - check the video stream in this website) on his computer because it perfectly summed up political life (not to mention most other careers).

I’ve heard, although I can’t recall who said it, “Failure is NOT an option.”  Uh, unfortunately, it is - and it happens way too often.

The best attitude to take when success isn’t the desired result comes from Colin Powell, who wisely said:

“You cannot slay the dragon every day.  Some days the dragon wins.”�

Colt McCoy has a National Championship ring (UT over SC, his freshman year), but he refuses to wear it.  “I didn’t win it,” said the Longhorns’ QB prior to the title game with Alabama.  The tone of his voice was such that he intended on getting another one - that he would wear.

Instead, just as the game began, he got leveled - and knew immediately, he was through for the night.  When you’re a right-handed quarterback and you can’t feel your right arm, that’s a hint-and-a-half that there’s something wrong.  He’s, as they say in that part of the country, “Texas tough,” which probably means if it were his left arm he couldn’t feel, he’d have given it a go, but playing one-handed - with your weaker hand - against the #1 team in the nation - well, sometimes a man just has to throw in the rope.

Coincidentally enough, on my way into work this morning, I was talking to my good friend, Peter Sharkey, long-time basketball coach at Hoover (Fresno) HS (in fact, he was recently inducted - and quite deservedly so - into the HHS Hall-of-Fame) and the name of a guy he played against in high school came up - Ernie DeGregorio.  We each remarked how crushing it was for Ernie (if you remember Ernie D, you’re probably very old and a true fan of college hoops) that he had such a wonderful career, but when his team, the Providence Friars, finally reached the promised land, i.e. the Final Four, he got hurt and couldn’t play.

His team, as McCoy’s, was denied the services of their best player (granted, UT has many other great players, as Providence did with Marvin Barnes) and, thus a chance to win the a National Championship although, also like McCoy, had he played, his team probably wouldn’t have won it anyway.  Just as Mark Ingram stood in Colt’s way, Bill Walton and his UCLA Bruins weren’t about to let anybody other than themselves take home the trophy.

Life can be great, and for Colt McCoy, he’s had a pretty good one so far, but as we all do, he learned first-hand what Colin Powell said about success:

“You can’t slay the dragon everyday.  Some days, the dragon wins.”

On 6/22/07, I posted a blog entitled, “Nearly Everyone Pleads Guilty to this Offense.”  It was about procrastinating.  Since I have to get up much earlier than usual to teach an intervention class that begins at 7:00 am on the dot (naturally, I want to get there a good deal earlier) and, although I’ve already looked over the material, I want to be sure I’m thoroughly prepared when the kids come in (those who scored low on the last test and are coming in for re-teaching and re-taking the test to raise their grade), I told myself I would blog early and get to bed.  While it’s earlier than I normally blog, it’s still much later than I had hoped to put this entry (and its author) to bed.  

All I can say is that what follows was true then and it’s true now.  See if you can relate:   

The “sin” most people will admit to committing is that of procrastination.  Why do it now when it will take time and effort & it’s so easy to put it off until tomorrow, next week, next month, next ______?  If what we need to do entails some type of confrontation or a situation that probably will cause us discomfort, we tend to think, “Let it be & maybe it will go away, or better yet, solve itself.”  Even if it’s just plain and simple WORK, we find ways to delay beginning it (and THAT’S the key: TO BEGIN).

I’ve worked for dozens of bosses and I’ve noticed that, almost to a person, the do-it-now people realize infinitely more success than the procrastinators.  Not surprisingly, those who put things off vastly outnumber those who take the “It may be difficult, it may be messy, it may be out of my comfort zone, but it needs to get resolved and needs to get resolved now.“ 

When it comes to procrastinating, I must admit (although I’m making really good improvement) I’ve been known to choose the path of least resistance, i.e. indecision over action, but I’ve noticed that nearly every time I do, the problem more often than not magnifies in intensity and I regret not having handled it at that time.  I can’t say I’m totally cured, but seldom does something occur in which a decision is needed that I won’t try at least some course of action.

The CD-on-tape in my car now is from the late business genius, Napolean Hill’s  four volume collection entitled The Laws of Success.  A passage from it reads, “If you are not sure which way to move, it’s better to shut your eyes & move in the dark than to remain still & make no move at all.  The world will forgive you if you make mistakes but it will never forgive you if you make no decision because it will never hear of you.”

Since that the time of that blog, I’ve listened to Do It Now!, Getting Things Done, and It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now.  Like I said, improvement: yes; totally conquered: unfortunately not.  I celebrate my successes or else I’d just be beating myself up.  I try to remember the words of former Secretary of State, Colin Powell:

“Procrastination in the name of reducing risk actually increases risk.”

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was a guest on Larry King Live last night and one of the questions the “King” asked him was whether he voted for Barack Obama because the Senator was black.

General Powell reminisced about his relationships with then-Senator Obama as well as the one he had with his “good friend of 30 years and fellow Vietnam veteran, John McCain.”  He said he weighed what he felt was each candidate’s philosophies, beliefs, platforms, strategies, plans (or whatever else a candidate has) for the United States and decided which man to support.

While he mentioned he had hoped race didn’t play a factor in his decision, there were a couple of things - one he said, and the other he didn’t - that made me skeptical.  I don’t pretend to be a voice specialist or an expert in body language, but I did detect a distinct hesitation in his voice (albeit brief) when he said race didn’t play a part.  Plus, later in the interview, he said that, on the night of the election, when he finally heard television reporters declare that Barack Obama was, in fact, going to be the country’s next president, he cried. Not that he shouldn’t have cried; that’s exactly what he, and the millions of African-Americans of his era, would be expected to do.  Yet, if his emotions were that strong, then quite possibly, race may have been more prominently on his mind than he’d realized at the time.

That interview reminded me of a story my late mentor, John Savage, used to tell when he said that people accused him of voting for John Kennedy because JFK was Catholic.  Savage always said:

“I did not vote for Kennedy because HE WAS CATHOLIC.  I voted for him because I’M Catholic.”