Ron Guidry, a pitcher with the New York Yankees, almost quit baseball when he was sent down to the minor league early in his career. The Yankees management told him that he just wasn’t ready for the big league. Guidry took it hard. He went home and told his wife, “That’s it. I’m not going back to the minors! I’ve worked like the dickens to get here. I’ve made it and I can’t go back.”
The Guidrys packed their belongings and started driving to the family home in the south. As they drove, Ron’s wife tried to persuade him to accept the demotion because she knew baseball was his first love. Not far from their destination, they stopped at a restaurant, where Guidry decided not to let the setback get the better of him.
“Okay,” he said, “I am going to give it one more chance.” That “one more” try took Guidry to the career he had dreamed of.
Doesn’t all this sound familiar? At some point in our lives we all have been there.
In the world of sport, there are great opportunities to learn about individual and team setbacks, and coming out of losing streaks. Sports offer valuable first-hand experience of negotiating obstacles life can put in your path. If you let them, some obstacles can throw you off balance perma-nently. Most people grow up with the idea that life ought to ‘work out’ all the time. We feel cheated or discouraged when it doesn’t. Sports participation helps us make sense of a life that doesn’t always ‘work out’. When we participate in games and sport we learn that winning doesn’t come easy. We learn to accept challenges, put in that extra effort and learn to vault over obstacles.
Sport provides the chance to develop qualities or ‘tools’ that will help you manage life’s tougher blows. These tools are: perseverance, courage and experience.
Perseverance. Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned from the late George ‘Shorty’ Kellogg, my YMCA coach, is that when you get knocked down in a game, you get right up and back into the scrum. He taught me never to give up because you can turn the tide. As the great American football quarterback Roger Staubach said, “Life is all about the ability to deal with the tough times. I get down. I get discouraged. I get frustrated… But I won’t give up. If you have enough perseverance, it is amazing what you can accomplish.”
Courage. To be a sportsperson or an athlete takes courage. Whether diving off a high dive tower or meeting an opponent in the boxing ring, you have to draw upon your courage to perform — to push your body to the limits of what it can achieve in your chosen game or sport. Sports participation helps you develop and test the courage you need to overcome life’s obstacles. Yet being courageous doesn’t mean never being afraid. New ventures always involve some helpful degree of fear or anxiety. It can help you perform better.
When I played basketball, if I wasn’t nervous before a game, it meant I was ill-prepared and would play poorly. Too much anxiety, on the other hand, immobilises you. It upsets your rhythm and throws off your timing. Instead of allowing anxiety to best you, welcome it as another opportunity to grow. Overcoming fear develops personal strength and courage to persevere.
Experience. This is a great teacher. When you’ve done something once, you know you can do it again. Sports events give you plenty of experience of managing obstacles — experience that can be called upon to help you overcome when confronted with difficult challenges in other spheres of life.
In April 1980 Tracy Austin was the No. 1 tennis player in the world. Then sciatica felled her. The pain kept her bedridden for quite some time. Little by little, she worked her way back until she found herself playing in the 1981 U.S. Open finals against Martina Navratilova, and was losing badly. She decided she could either throw in the towel or fight back, point by point, little by little, as she had in her match against sciatic pain. She did, and won her most famous victory.
After eight years and many obstacles, Tracy was once again immobilised after a car accident. While going through agonising physical therapy to regain the ability to walk, she mustered courage from past experience in overcoming pain to win back her life. She knew what had helped her win then — resolve, discipline, and faith in herself — would again get her back on her feet.
These are lessons that can be learned in sports arenas and playing fields — how to handle setbacks and losses, to pick one’s self off the floor and get back into the breach. Sportspeople also learn the necessity of doing whatever it takes to either return to their original goals and purpose, or adapt to new realities and move on to new purposes. Lessons learned in sports arenas and put to good use, give you a head start in negotiating obstacles that you will inevitably confront in life, off the sports field.
(This article is adapted from Dr. George Selleck’s book How to Play the Game of your Life: A Guide to Success in Sports and Life)