Basketball Life Quotes

Everyone has the fire, but the champions know when to ignite the spark.

Basketball Rule #1 In this game of life your family is the court and the ball is your heart. No matter how good you are, no matter how down you get, always leave your heart on the court.

I am more than just a Serious basketball fan. I am a life-long Addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky.

Basketball rule #3 Never let anyone lower your goals. Others’ expectations of you are determined by their limitations of life. The sky is your limit, sons. Always shoot for the sun and you will shine.

Basketball Rule #4 If you miss enough of life's free throws you will pay in the end.

Life is like a basketball game, you can shoot but miss. sometimes you even lose a game. There is always a next tournament, but never a time to give up.

You need to be more careful, or you could hurt yourself." Right. Thank you, Mrs. Detweiler. I never would have come to that conclusion by myself. I was planning on incorporating a backflip into my next walk across the classroom but on second thought...

We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us—anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.

Champions never sleep, the eternal spirit keep them alert and awake.

people used to tell me that i had beautiful hands told me so often, in fact, that one day i started to believe them until i asked my photographer father, “hey daddy could i be a hand model” to which he said no way, i dont remember the reason he gave me and i wouldve been upset, but there were far too many stuffed animals to hold too many homework assignment to write, too many boys to wave at too many years to grow, we used to have a game, my dad and i about holding hands cus we held hands everywhere, and every time either he or i would whisper a great big number to the other, pretending that we were keeping track of how many times we had held hands that we were sure, this one had to be 8 million 2 thousand 7 hundred and fifty three. hands learn more than minds do, hands learn how to hold other hands, how to grip pencils and mold poetry, how to tickle pianos and dribble a basketball, and grip the handles of a bicycle how to hold old people, and touch babies , i love hands like i love people, they're the maps and compasses in which we navigate our way through life, some people read palms to tell your future, but i read hands to tell your past, each scar marks the story worth telling, each calloused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory, now ive seen middle eastern hands clenched in middle eastern fists pounding against each other like war drums, each country sees theyre fists as warriors and others as enemies. even if fists alone are only hands. but this is not about politics, no hands arent about politics, this is a poem about love, and fingers. fingers interlock like a beautiful zipper of prayer. one time i grabbed my dads hands so that our fingers interlocked perfectly but he changed positions, saying no that hand hold is for your mom. kids high five, but grown ups, we learn how to shake hands, you need a firm hand shake,but dont hold on too tight, but dont let go too soon, but dont hold down for too long, but hands are not about politics, when did it become so complicated. i always thought its simple. the other day my dad looked at my hands, as if seeing them for the first time, and with laughter behind his eye lids, with all the seriousness a man of his humor could muster, he said you know you got nice hands, you could’ve been a hand model, and before the laughter can escape me, i shake my head at him, and squeeze his hand, 8 million 2 thousand 7hundred and fifty four.

People always assume I play basketball because I'm tall. I'd like to ask people if they play miniature golf because they're short, but I had a feeling breaking that one out right now wasn't going to endear me to anyone.

It is not over. Champions extend their limits and make things happen.

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.

Basketball was the first thing in William’s life that loved him back.

No matter what...ball made my heart beat faster, made me want to jump up and down and be Superman. That's what life was about anyway, being Superman and living like life itself was important. Basketball made my life important.

I have some advice for the young generation who are wanting to become successful in life: become more grateful. Once you do that, Allah says, "If you are grateful, I will surely increase you (in everything)." If you're having a hard time in math, science, language and whatever else, become grateful to Allah and He will open doors for you. You'll even get better at basketball and become more athletic. I pray that Allah makes you grateful young people who are examples for others all over the world, ameen.

Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.

If all I'm remembered for is being a good basketball player, then I've done a bad job with the rest of my life.

To sit in this awful mess and maybe smoke some dope and watch some innocuous shit on a dumb glass tube and feel fine about it and know there's really nothing you have to do, ever, but feel your warm friend's silent content. You don't feel guilty about not fighting a war or carrying signs to protest it either. We've just mastered the life of doing nothing, which when you think about it, may be the hardest thing of all to do.

Basketball Rule #3 Never let anyone lower your goals. Others' expectations of you are determined by their limitations of life. The sky is your limit, sons. Always shoot for the sun and you will shine.

Just imagine what would have happened if Michael Jordan quit after getting cut from his High School Basketball team?

I watch basketball like I watch baseball: I don’t. I’d much rather watch grass grow. Actually, golf isn’t that bad.

Everyone who loves pro basketball assumes it's a little fixed. We all think the annual draft lottery is probably rigged, we all accept that the league aggressively wants big market teams to advance deep into the playoffs, and we all concede that certain marquee players are going to get preferential treatment for no valid reason. The outcomes of games aren't predeteremined or scripted but there are definitely dark forces who play with our reality. There are faceless puppet masters who pull strings and manipulate the purity of justice. It's not necessarily a full-on conspiracy, but it's certainly not fair. And that's why the NBA remains the only game that matters: Pro basketball is exactly like life.

...it's just one miss, but you're gonna have a whole lotta makes in this life, 'cause you're just that good, and it's okay to be down and upset as long as you're not down and out

The goal in life is just the same as in basketball: make the effort to do the best you are capable of doing

There are people in this life for whom even the best of things don't work out. They could wear cashmere suits and still look like tramps; be very rich but badly in debt; be tall but lousy at basketball.

In order to be a winner, you have to look for ways of getting things done and not for reasons why things can’t be done. People who live with excuses have things that can’t be done hovering around them all the time.

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.

Down the hall I could hear the thud of basketballs, the blare of the time-out horn, and the shouts of the crowd as the sports-beasts fought: Lisbon Greyhounds versus Jay Tigers. Who can know when life hangs in the balance, or why?

If you only ever like people you don't know and who don't know you, the ball is perpetually in their court. Only they don't realize that you think they're playing basketball with you. They are not actually at the court. You think you're there. But really you're not there, either.

You feel ownership over your creation, your invention, and your ideas. But if you don’t legally claim them, you’re donating them to the public—or to competitors. Say you’ve come up with a solution to a problem. Protecting that potentially valuable IP creates a limited monopoly to keep people out. It’s like zone defense in basketball. IP rights help you own your zone—your competitive space where no one else can score. If the best offense is a great defense, then no offense is the worst.

She played the game the way that it was meant to be played⎼as if her life depended on it. And she seemed driven by some need, or struggle, or fundamental resolve, that preceded the basketball and made it possible..

We’ve all heard the usual examples: Michael Jordan cut from his high school basketball team, Walt Disney fired by a newspaper editor for not being creative enough, the Beatles turned away by a record executive who told them that “guitar groups are on their way out.” In fact, many of their winning mantras essentially describe the notion of falling up: “I’ve failed over and over again in my life,” Jordan once said, “and that is why I succeed.” Robert F. Kennedy said much the same: “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” And Thomas Edison, too, once claimed that he had failed his way to success.

at the heart of character is honesty and integrity.

If I woke up one morning and realized that all I ever was going to be was a business man, I'd probably die. All my dreams would be shattered. Early in life I had many dreams. I dreamed of being a great basketball star. I dreamed of being a preacher. I dreamed of saving the world from war and racism. And I dreamed of being a great poet. Today, I dream only of writing.

Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.

You have to dance beautifully in the box that you're comfortable dancing in. My box was to be extremely ambitious within the sport of basketball. Your box is different than mine. Everybody has their own. It's your job to try to perfect it and make it as beautiful of a canvas as you can make it. And if you have done that, then you have lived a successful life. You have lived with Mamba Mentality.

was right then that I knew I’d called the wrong person. I should have dialed Oscar, my slightly younger brother, instead. He was the levelheaded one in my life, the basketball player studying mechanical engineering.

Acting on desire is more like a craft, a science, an art. It takes careful mindful practice. Be patient and quiet. Listen, observe, take notes. Figure out what you want, privately, and then choose to want it, publicly. Put your desire out in the open. I want to go swimming. I want to bake bread. I want to paint a picture. I want to build a chair. I want to write a book. You act and then you fail. Over and over. And it’s better to start failing when you’re young, when all you lose is an ice-cream cone or a basketball game or an afternoon of fun. When you’re older, the stakes are higher. If adults don’t know how to want, then they lose a love, a career, a life.

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children’s plays, adult plays … I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year’s, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what’s left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that

There’s more to life than basketball. The most important thing is your family and taking care of each other and loving each other no matter what.

IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent.68 If

Pretending you aren’t going to die is detrimental to your enjoyment of life. It is detrimental in the same way that it would be detrimental for a basketball player to pretend there was no end to the game he was playing. That player would reduce his intensity, adopt a lazy playing style, and, of course, end up not having any fun at all. Without an end, there is no game. Without being conscious of death, you can’t be fully aware of the gift of life.

and everybody was happy that uncle lee was able to get that scholarship even though you wondered when you could do quadratic equations in your head why you had a basketball scholarship but you always knew that you had to take what they were giving since that was all you were going to get but you never fooled yourself about either the taking or the giving or the needing or the having you just sort of said to yourself I'll have to see what is being offered

You know how when you step on court your coach is like "go go go!"? And all throughout you just keep telling yourself to hit harder and harder and keep at it? You know how much you treasure those five-minute timeouts? You know how good you feel at the end of a session? You know how you're glad you're tired? No pills, no shots, just plain energy. I want to work like that. Whether I have to write ten thousand words or send five hundred emails, brainstorm for hours at a time, I want to have that energy. To keep fighting. To know it's all worth it. Oh, yeah. That's my perfect day.

When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.” —John Wooden, one of the most successful coaches in the history of college basketball

I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.

When I was teaching basketball, I urged my players to try their hardest to improve on that very day, to make that practice a masterpiece. Too often we get distracted by what is outside our control. You can’t do anything about yesterday. The door to the past has been shut and the key thrown away. You can do nothing about tomorrow. It is yet to come. However, tomorrow is in large part determined by what you do today. So make today a masterpiece. You have control over that. This rule is even more important in life than basketball. You have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better. Only then will you will be able to approach being the best you can be. It begins by trying to make each day count and knowing you can never make up for a lost day.

Advising the average person to not concern herself with calories but instead to pay attention to hunger triggers and eating foods rick in nutrients--well, it's a wonderful concept. I also love the thought of unicorns jumping over cotton candy rainbows. I'm even considering taking up basketball to see if it makes me taller. Come on already! Suggesting that someone who struggles with his weight does not need to think about calories is as risky as suggesting you not look at price tags the next time you're in the market for a car.

What Michelle didn’t yet know was that there is a vast difference between playing and leading. The point guard position in basketball is one of the great tutorials on leadership, and it ought to be taught in classrooms. Anyone can perfect a dribble with muscle memory;

guy raised his hand and asked if I had any advice when it came to “coaching women.” I remember leveling him with a death ray stare and then relaxing and curling up the corner of my mouth and saying, “Don’t worry about coaching ‘women.’ Just go home and coach ‘basketball.’ 

it's simple enough, really: because they give us hope. Because they give us power. Because we want to have that feeling where everything in life melts away and all you have is a pen, a paintbrush, a guitar, a lump of clay, a basketball. We chase dreams because, in the end, it's all we know how to do.

No matter how hard you work at your craft and no matter how successful you become, people just have to find something negative to hang on you. You can be the greatest ever at what you do, and people will still turn on you. Even with all the championships Michael Jordan has won, people say, "Well, he's a great basketball player but he's not socially conscious." The bar is always being raised as you go. The rules are always being rewritten. There's aggravation that comes with that, but that's part of what makes triupmh so swett.

How does a person show respect for anything? He gives it time.

I looked like a fucking ventriloquist’s dummy who’d come to life in an assisted-living facility. No basketball was going to undo that.

My hunger is not for success, it is for excellence. Because when you attain excellence, success just naturally follows.

The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not

Don’t worry about losing. Think about winning.” – Mike Krzyzewski, 5-Time National Champion Basketball Coach

To defend my fear of sudden change, I chose to believe that life was incremental, that the tiny decisions you make every day determine your fate, that your job is to captain an enormous ship subtly into ever-clearer waters. But that’s not how it works at all. Life occurs in moments. You get into college. You propose. You get the job. You get cancer. You get fired. She leaves you...Because I was born in a stable country at a stable time, I falsely extrapolated that change is incremental. But if you zoom out just a little bit, you see that life is soccer, not basketball. It’s revolution, invention, war. It’s big bangs, exploding stars, asteroids killing the dinosaurs. Which means that all the action is in the risk taking, whether I want it to be or not.

He's still blabbing about how much he hates Mark Watts and now sucky he is at basketball (Who cares?),which I interpret as Blah,blah,kill me now, blah, blah, my life is over, blah, blah, blah.

Now, if basketball had a designated foul-​shot shooter, maybe I'd consider. The other team fouls you, you get to pay them back. Boom. But that's not the way it works, in basketball or in life.

Basketball rule #3 Never let anyone lower your goals Other's expectations of you are determined by their limitations of life. The sky is the limit, sons. Always shoot for the sun And you _will_ shine.

All great athletes essentially come to a fork in the road where they have to change their approach to succeed. It's a sign of intelligence and character. My college coach, Jack Hartman, made me play only defense for a full year in practice when I became academically ineligible for my junior year at Southern Illinois. Embarrassed, I thought at first about arguing with Coach Hartman over what I felt was a tremendous slight. But instead I started lifting weights and working so hard on my defense that my teammates hated to see me match up against them in practice. That was the turning point of my life, on and off the court.

Basketball is not the ultimate. It is of small importance in comparison to the total life we live. There is only one kind of life that truly wins, and that is the one that places faith in the hands of the Savior.

I had a crush, but I'm not sure I actually had a crush on Sam Hunt. He was the face attached to it, but I don't really know much about him at all. I thought he played basketball, but I think it may have actually been volleyball. No matter. I took what I knew, and I filled in the details to my liking. It was fun. And also ridiculous. When you have a crush on a half-real, half-imaginary boy, you will always be disappointed.

My cousins are hurting. My aunt is hurting. My mother is hurting. And there is no one here to help. How is this the good life, when even the air in this place threatens to wrap its fingers around my throat? In Haiti, with all its problems, there was always a friend or a neighbor to share in the misery. And then, after our troubles were tallied up like those points at the basketball game, we would celebrate being alive. But here, there isn’t even a slice of happiness big enough to fill up all these empty houses, and broken buildings, and wide roads that lead to nowhere and everywhere. Every bit of laughter, every joyous moment, is swallowed up by a deep, deep sadness.

I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might be commonly overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t. They are fundamental to your progress in basketball, business, and life. They are the difference between champions and near champions. For example, at the first squad meeting each season, held two weeks before our first actual practice, I personally demonstrated how I wanted players to put on their socks each and every time: Carefully roll the socks down over the toes, ball of the foot, arch and around the heel, then pull the sock up snug so there will be no wrinkles of any kind.

…I am certain of this one truth: men can achieve closeness without intimacy, while women can achieve intimacy without closeness. For example, Bobbie knows every intimate detail of her dental hygienist’s private life. She doesn’t have a close relationship with her, but she knows more about the woman who cleans her teeth twice a year than I do about most of the guys I play basketball with every week. And still I feel a closeness with every one of them. Maybe it’s because I don’t know too much.

Bloody rain” says Mr Chivers Bouncing a basketball On the one dry patch of court bloody rain” he nods to our Sports class And gives us the afternoon off. Bloody rain all right As Annabel and I run to Megalong Creek hut Faster than we ever have in Chivers’s class And the exercise we have in mind We’ve been training for all year But I doubt if old Chivers Will give us a medal if he ever finds out. We high jump into the hut And strip down Climb under the blankets And cheer the bloody rain As it does a lap or two Around the mountain While Annabel and me Embrace like winners should Like good sports do As Mr. Chivers sips his third coffee And twitches his bad knee From his playing days While miles away Annabel and I Score a convincing victory And for once in our school life The words “Physical Education” Make sense…

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

Basketball’s real gift was teaching me that it’s limiting to try to measure a life in points per game, grade point averages, or other arbitrary metrics of success. It’s fine to strive for greatness, but as Anyu has demonstrated, it’s far more lasting to take pride in your goodness.

That’s not how grief works. Grief is a … whew. I can’t even say the word I want to say and keep it PG-13! Grief doesn’t care about your timeline. Grief doesn’t care about your neat little boxes. Grief is so messy. Some days, I was really negative. Everything sucked. Everyone sucked. Basketball sucked. Life sucked.

We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones; we need a life neither patternless nor over patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it. True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight. Adam naming the animals is instituting the first of all the liturgies; speech, by which man the priest of creation picks up each of the world's pieces and by his wonder bears it into the dance. "By George," he says, "there's an elephant in my garden; isn't that something!" Adam has been at work a long time; civilization is the fruit of his priestly labors. Culture is the liturgy of nature as it is offered up by man. But culture can come only from caring enough about things to want them really to be themselves - to want the poem to scan perfectly, the song to be genuinely melodic, the basketball actually to drop through the middle of the hoop, the edge of the board to be utterly straight, the pastry to be really flaky. Few of us have very many great things to care about, but we all have plenty of small ones; and that's enough for the dance. It is precisely through the things we put on the table, and the liturgies we form around it, that the city is built, caring is more than half the work.

The testosterone-fueled chip on my shoulder came from a high school career spent futilely awaiting a timely puberty while standing a good foot taller than everyone on earth, all the boys at my high school included. None of them ever asked me out, but I could make them laugh and kick their asses at basketball, so rather than fail at seducing them, I simply became one of them.

In his book Earthen Vessels, Matthew Lee Anderson argues that just as basketball players train their bodies through practice drills, “practicing the presentation of our bodies as living sacrifices in a corporate context through raising hands, lifting our eyes to the heavens, kneeling, and reciting prayers simply trains us in our whole person, body and soul, to be oriented around the throne of grace.

You read about tragedies in the paper, where a student athlete falls dead in the middle of a basketball game or a National Honor student is killed by a drunk driver or a school shooting claims the life of a preteen. In the news you see their faces, braces and cowlicks and freckles. You tell yourself this wouldn’t happen in your hometown. You tell yourself this isn’t anyone you know. Until it does, and it is.

But in real life, the good boys are all hiding the fact that they’re really bad boys, and no one believes it until it’s too late. That’s why her friend Kaylin got raped by the assistant basketball coach and had to leave school last year. He, of course, is now the head coach. Because there wasn’t any evidence, and when it came down to Kaylin’s word versus everyone else, Kaylin lost. Good basketball coaches are hard to find.

As researchers Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool underscore in their book Peak, mastery requires deliberate practice, and lots of it. But if you love it, you do it. Picasso experimented with other forms of art but kept painting as his focus. Michael Jordan did a stint at baseball, but basketball was where he really thrived. Play hardest in your area of strength and you’ll achieve depth, meaning, and satisfaction in your life.

I still suffer hate and pain in my heart every time I see the word "Duke" on a TV screen, and that rotten Thing happened nine years ago when that Swine Christian Laettner hit that impossible last-second shot against Kentucky. I still have a Memory Block about it -- but as I recall it was in the East Regional final that is still known as "the Best basketball game ever played." Geez, it Was and remains the Worst Shock I've experienced in my Life.

If you are disappointed because you can’t be the best person to do everything yourself, you are terribly naive. Nobody can do everything well. Would you want to have Einstein on your basketball team? When he fails to dribble and shoot well, would you think badly of him? Should he feel humiliated? Imagine all the areas in which Einstein was incompetent, and imagine how hard he struggled to excel even in the areas in which he was the best in the world.

And as I sit and reflect, I m left with one question - What's next for me? What challenges does life pose for me tomorrow ? How long will I continue to bounce this ball ? And when this ball stops , where will I find myself? Will I be simply remembered as some guy who had success overseas?Will i rely solely on my past and be one who just talks about my glory days as professional basketball player? NOT LIKELY!!J.R.HOLDEN REPRESENTS SO MUCH MORE THAN AN ATHLETE .

Who is the learner and what is his or her relationship to knowledge and learning? Is he or she basically good or evil (or both)? Passive or active in learning? Capable of choice, or has life already been determined somehow? Motivated internally or externally? An unmarked slate or having unrealized potential? These questions are answered every day in every classroom, daycare center, or basketball court—answered by the way children are viewed and treated by adults.

I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive cliched gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of pratical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.

They say DNA is destiny. And probably this is true for those with gift coded in their genes: say, a rare beauty or intelligence, the ability to run a four minute mile or dunk a basketball, or perhaps just innate cunning or insatiable drive. But for the rest of the world, those born without some obvious greatness, it's not your DNA that will get you ahead; it's the life you were born into. The opportunities you were (or weren't) handed on a silver platter. It's your circumstances.

the sage Lenny Millstein, who not only was an excellent basketball man but an excellent person as well, who knew how to handle fourteen-year-old boys because he understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body, and in the furnace of that claustrophobic arena of

Listen to me closely. I don’t care if you toss your skates in the trash tomorrow. I don’t care what you choose to do for the rest of your life as long as you’re happy.” He chuckles and relaxes back into the chair. “If you’d picked up a basketball all those years ago, I’d be courtside for the rest of my life with one of those big foam fingers. If you take up a paintbrush, I’ll buy every piece that we have wall space for. If you use that big brain of yours for engineering or law, I’ll do whatever I can to show I support you until my last breath.

SLEEPAWAY" When teenage boys go to sleepaway camps every summer they arrive with big hearts and nervous apprehension— do they throw their duffels to the ground and go straight to the basketball court or do they pause and have earnest conversations: How was your year? How is your mother? What are you passionate about lately? Each, broken down later in life in cars with their wives on superhighway shoulders, glorious desert vistas in their ice-caked windshields, frozen stiff by the whiskey winds, they are rocked, frayed forever.

The illusion of pattern affects our lives in many ways off the basketball court. How many good years should you wait before concluding that an investment adviser is unusually skilled? How many successful acquisitions should be needed for a board of directors to believe that the CEO has extraordinary flair for such deals? The simple answer to these questions is that if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable. Be audacious. There is always a best possible path. Your job is to find it and have the courage to follow it. What you think is attainable is just a function of what you know at the moment. Once you start your pursuit you will learn a lot, especially if you triangulate with others; paths you never saw before will emerge. Of course there are some impossibilities or near-impossibilities, such as playing center on a professional basketball team if you’re short, or running a four-minute mile at age seventy.

Yes. I agree with Emily. She’s the one who betrayed him. You were just a handy tool. If what happened somehow poisoned their relationship, it was her doing. It was her decision. You don’t owe Greg Downing a thing.” “Even if what you’re saying is true,” he said, “that bond is still there.” “Bullshit,” Esperanza said. “That’s just a load of pedantic, macho bullshit. You’re just proving my point. There’s no bond anymore, if there ever was one. Basketball hasn’t been a part of your life for a decade. The only reason you think the bond is still there is because you’re playing again.” There

A giant rose from the second row. Seriously, the biggest man I’ve ever seen in real life. His head was the size of a basketball, and his back was like a king-size mattress. Except made of bricks. “Good afternoon,” the giant said. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This humongous monster of a man had the voice of a six -year-old. High, squeaky. Like , cute. I could hear that weird sound when you try to hold in a laugh, but a little bit leaks out— like a mouth fart— happening all over the church. People were trying not to crack up, but his voice made it so hard.

At the time I was, and would continue to be for many years, obsessed with the Sweet Valley High books. I read them voraciously because I was nothing like Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield or even Enid Rollins. I would never date a boy like Todd Wilkins, the handsome captain of the basketball team, or Bruce Patman, the handsome, wealthy bad boy of Sweet Valley. When I read the books, though, I could pretend that a better life was possible for me, one where I fit in somewhere, anywhere, and I had friends and a handsome boyfriend and a loving family who knew everything about me. In a better life, I could pretend I was a good girl.

I often tell my students that there is creative reading, creative thinking, not just creative writing. He said a basketball game was just like the rest of life, the minutes and days and years played off the court. What miracles swirl within a single teardrop! I imagined the feeling I had had to be something like what a plant must feel when it rains: no intermediary, no translation; just deep stillness, and growth. There are moments in a life that are the seeds of all later fruit, the fulcrums on which everything else depends. My book ends with this quote from a Beatles song: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

The good part about these areas that we were taking over, was that all of them had parks where a lot of guys were just hanging out playing basketball. So I used those parks to make a good first impression with my gun, then I followed up with a speech presentation. At the end of the day, we were able to win over the entire park, and eventually their community….. It was as if these fellas from different areas were just waiting for this, because no one else was going around to them. No one else was telling them that they were needed, only us. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members

with exuberance and excitement. You should live the journey. You should live it right. You should live it together. You should live it shared. You should try to make one another better. You should get on one another if somebody’s not doing their part. You should hug one another when they are. You should be disappointed in a loss and exhilarated in a win. It’s all about the journey. It should be honest and it should be real. It’s not about winning games or what other people’s expectations of us may be. We’re not going to fall into the traps that so many people fall into. That’s not why we’re going to play. We’re going to play for innocence. I’m ready. There are no excuses. Let’s go!

Maybe an example Joseph gave us would make this clearer. It had to do with a study that was done with two comparable basketball teams. Team A was coached with an emphasis on preventing mistakes on the court. Day after day, they reviewed videos that focused on their errors. Those mistakes got grooved in their brains. By contrast, Team B was coached with an emphasis on building on their successes. Day after day, they reviewed videos that focused on their most successful plays. So Team B’s successes got grooved in their brains. “To put it simply, Team A focused on what was wrong. Team B focused on what was right. I’m sure you can guess which team had the greatest improvement by the end of the season.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. But we`ll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs won’t make a sound anymore. We’ve caused a lot of suffering, but we’ve also caused much else. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player’s mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver’s mental representations will be useless for basketball. This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner

Enjoying the taste of toasted raisin bread or the humor in a cartoon may not seem like much, but simple pleasures like these ease emotional upsets, lift your mood, and enrich your life. They also provide health benefits, by releasing endorphins and natural opioids that shift you out of stressful, draining reactive states and into happier responsive ones. As a bonus, some pleasures—such as dancing, sex, your team winning a game of pick-up basketball, or laughing with friends—come with energizing feelings of vitality or passion that enhance long-term health. Opportunities for pleasure are all around you, especially if you include things like the rainbow glitter of the tiny grains of sand in a sidewalk, the sound of water falling into a tub, the sense of connection in talking with a friend, or the reassurance that comes from the stove working when you need to make dinner.

If you talk to these extraordinary people, you find that they all understand this at one level or another. They may be unfamiliar with the concept of cognitive adaptability, but they seldom buy into the idea that they have reached the peak of their fields because they were the lucky winners of some genetic lottery. They know what is required to develop the extraordinary skills that they possess because they have experienced it firsthand. One of my favorite testimonies on this topic came from Ray Allen, a ten-time All-Star in the National Basketball Association and the greatest three-point shooter in the history of that league. Some years back, ESPN columnist Jackie MacMullan wrote an article about Allen as he was approaching his record for most three-point shots made. In talking with Allen for that story, MacMullan mentioned that another basketball commentator had said that Allen was born with a shooting touch—in other words, an innate gift for three-pointers. Allen did not agree. “I’ve argued this with a lot of people in my life,” he told MacMullan. “When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in every day.’ Not some days. Every day. Ask anyone who has been on a team with me who shoots the most. Go back to Seattle and Milwaukee, and ask them. The answer is me.” And, indeed, as MacMullan noted, if you talk to Allen’s high school basketball coach you will find that Allen’s jump shot was not noticeably better than his teammates’ jump shots back then; in fact, it was poor. But Allen took control, and over time, with hard work and dedication, he transformed his jump shot into one so graceful and natural that people assumed he was born with it. He took advantage of his gift—his real gift.   ABOUT

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multi cellar ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

Even before I owned one, I'd always taken issue with the casual way people throw around the word 'cabin.' It seemed that somewhere along the line, the definition of a cabin went from a primitive, basic-needs shelter to any structure that had more than six or seven trees around it. I'd once been invited to a friend's supposed cabin only to arrive and find that it had a basketball court. Cabins do not have basketball courts. Cabins have tetanus. True cabins are hardly better than tents. They have limited amenities, basic comforts, and inefficient systems that make you thankful for the plush life you live 95 percent of the time. They are not anyplace with a sign above the toilet that says, "Life Is Better in the Woods." Cabins are small, musty places. They are poorly finished, outfitted with the hand-me-downs of people's real homes. They are repositories for knives that are a bit too dull, furniture that no longer matches, and artwork showcasing anything but good taste. When you enter a cabin, there should be a sense of encountering how things used to be, not just a variation on how they already are.

This scene came from the writing I did with Bill in New York, working out of an office in the Director’s Guild building. I generally came in early and worked for a couple of hours before Bill arrived. He would then spend about an hour puttering around the office and smoking cheroots, then would eventually settle in next to me at the desk, read what I had written, and begin offering suggestions and improvements. Sometimes I would print out a scene and then mark it up—as with the scene above—as Bill tried out Phil’s dialogue, and we tweaked lines accordingly. Our afternoons were often spent walking around New York running Bill’s errands while talking about general script issues. He was a warm and wonderful host to me during my New York visit. There was an afternoon where he and Tom Davis paired up against me and Dan Aykroyd in a spontaneous basketball game, the four of us sneakerless and slipping around in our socks. I made my bones with Bill that day when he hurled a basketball at my head and I managed to duck. “Good reflexes,” he said. I think of these two weeks with Bill as one of the more surreal and memorable experiences of my writer’s life.

The primary challenge of happiness research comes in the application of insight to actual lives, each of which is highly individual and does not fit neatly into any group template. The findings and ideas we’ve presented in this book are based on research, but science can’t know the turmoil or contradictions you feel in your heart. It can’t quantify the stir that you experience when a certain friend calls. It can’t know what keeps you up at night, or what you regret, or how you express your love. Science can’t say whether you’re calling your kids too much or too little, or whether you should reconnect with a particular family member. It can’t say if it would be better for you to have a heart-to-heart over a cup of coffee or play a game of basketball or go for a walk with a friend. Those answers can only come through reflection, and figuring out what works for you. For anything in this book to be useful, you will need to tune in to your unique life experience and make its lessons your own. But here’s what science can tell you: Good relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. This is true across the lifespan, and across cultures and contexts, which means it is almost certainly true for you, and for nearly every human being who has ever lived.

Shannon,” Darren said with a sigh. “I didn’t want to leave you behind.” “But you did, Darren,” I whispered, forcing myself not to blink. “You did leave us behind.” “Do you hate me?” “No.” I sighed. “But I don’t know who you are anymore.” I lifted my gaze to meet his. “And you don’t know me, either.” “I know who you are, Shannon,” he said, voice trembling. “You’re my baby sister who loves to sing and dance and read—and you’re smart. You’re so smart, Shannon. You’ve got the best school marks out of all of us. You love to play basketball. You love animals. Your favorite color is pink. You’re always bringing home injured animals and birds and nursing them back to health. You want to go to University College Dublin to study to be a veterinarian, and your ultimate ambition in life has always been to travel the world.” “I don’t sing anymore and I don’t dance. My favorite color is green, and I haven’t picked up a basketball since Da stuck a knife through mine for bouncing it against the side of the house. I stopped bringing home animals a long time ago because I realized I didn’t want them to be caged with me—when I realized they were safer in the wild than with me. I’m not going to go to college and become a vet because I’ve failed every single one of my classes for the last three years.

The next morning, I went over to pick them up. I’d spent the night thinking of more things I should tell them--everything about Chris I thought they needed to know. It was all too much. “I don’t know how to tell you everything,” I confessed to Bradley as he got into the car. I started to cry. “There’s so many things and we have such a short amount of time.” “Just being here is all we need,” he said. “I’m not an impersonator. I’m just here to feel Chris’s life--I feel him here with me right now.” Bradley put me at ease and I calmed down. Back at the house, he and Clint became almost like family. Little bits of their personality came out as well--and I saw a glimmer of Clint’s famous Dirty Harry character later on in the day when I had to leave to go to Bubba’s basketball game. They’d talked about coming with me--which frankly would have created an impossible circus. But I did give them the option. As they stood trying to make up their minds, I snapped into anxious mom mode. “All right,” I told them both. “You’re welcome to come. But if you’re coming, we’re leaving now.” I guess my tone was a little too strident. “So you want to get tough with me, huh, lady?” said Clint in his best Dirty Harry voice as he raised his eyebrow. It’s amazing how threatening a simple facial tic can be. I left them home to study some of Chris’s replica guns and gear. Our own already had its ample share of lawmen.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. Have they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

About four months into it, we were shooting hoops in my dad’s driveway when Chip stopped in his tracks, held me in his arms, looked into my eyes under the starry sky, and said, “I love you.” And I looked at him and said, “Thank you.” “Thank you?” Chip said. I know I should have said, “I love you too,” but this whole thing had been such a whirlwind, and I was just trying to process it all. No guy had ever told me he loved me before, and here Chip was saying it after what seemed like such a short period of time. Chip got angry. He grabbed his basketball from under my arm and went storming off with it like a four-year-old. I really thought, What in the world is with this girl? I just told her I loved her, and that’s all she can say? It’s not like I just went around saying that to people all the time. So saying it was a big deal for me too. But now I was stomping down the driveway going, Okay, that’s it. Am I dating an emotionless cyborg or something? I’m going home. Chip took off in his big, white Chevy truck with the Z71 stickers on the side, even squealing his tires a bit as he drove off, and it really sank in what a big deal that must have been for him. I felt bad--so bad that I actually got up the courage to call him later that night. I explained myself, and he said he understood, and by the end of the phone call we were right back to being ourselves. Two weeks later, when Chip said, “I love you” again, I responded, “I love you too.” There was no hesitation. I knew I loved him, and I knew it was okay to say so. I’m not sure why I ever gave him a second chance when he showed up ninety minutes late for our first date or why I gave him another second chance when he didn’t call me for two months after that. And I’m not sure why he gave me a second chance after I blew that romantic moment in the driveway. But I’m very glad I did, and I’m very glad he did too--because sometimes second chances lead to great things. All of my doubts, all of the things I thought I wanted out of a relationship, and many of the things I thought I wanted out of life itself turned out to be just plain wrong. Instead? That voice from our first date turned out to be the thing that was absolutely right.

-Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter. The following passage is an example of typical dialogue writing: A: Tomorrow is a big day. You have an interview at a college. How do you feel? B: I am really nervous. This is the first interview and I don’t know what it is going to be like. A: What are you afraid of? B: I’m afraid I’ll stutter and say something stupid. I’m worried the person will ask a question and I won’t know what to say. A: What do you want to discuss? B: I think it is good that I was on the basketball team for four years. That shows commitment and dedication. I also got decent grades and earned a blue ribbon at the science fair. A: What about your hobbies outside of school? B: I really like to read. I could mention that. I could talk also about the vacations my family has taken. They are pretty interesting. I enjoy my part-time retail job. A: It sounds like you do a lot. B: I guess I am good at organizing my life and accomplishing what needs to be done. Hey, that would sound good in an interview! -Try focused “freewriting.” Pick one topic, such as school, friends, or family, and write everything that comes to mind about that topic. Write for at least ten minutes or until you’re certain that you have run out of things to write. -Write your belief system. Start by writing “I believe…” at the top of a clean page. Then write whatever comes to mind. It may help to ask yourself questions when you get stuck such as “What do I believe about friendship?” “What is my personal style?” or “What are my gifts and abilities?” -Write about an event from your perspective, then write about the same event from someone else’s point of view. For example, if you had a hard time answering a question during class, write about how you felt, what you thought, and how you behaved. Next, pretend you are the teacher writing about the same event. What do you think he or she was thinking? How did he or she act? This exercise is a great way to show that there are multiple ways of seeing the same situation.

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” —MICHAEL JORDAN, basketball star

ON JULY 1, 2006, Cory Booker officially took office as the new mayor of Newark. He’d gained fame in the late ’90s as a city councilman who would sleep in a tent at city housing projects, hold hunger strikes and live on food stamps, patrol bad neighborhoods himself and physically confront the dealers holding down their corners. His victory was the first regime change in two decades, and it happened only after six years of near-bloody battling between the young, charismatic, light-skinned, Stanford-Yale-Oxford-educated upstart and the old, grizzled, but equally charismatic incumbent. The tension between Cory Booker and Sharpe James had been national news for most of the ’00s. The 2002 election, which Booker lost, was documented in the Oscar-nominated Streetfight, which between talking head interviews showed intense footage of the predominantly poor, black constituents who ardently supported James’s altercating with the working-class whites and Puerto Ricans who fought for Booker and his eloquent calls for public service and revitalization. The documentary was a near-perfect picture of a specific place and time: the declining city at risk of being left behind, the shoulder-height view of the vast number of problems in play, and the presentation of two equal and opposing paths forward whose backers were split almost definitively along socioeconomic lines. The 2002 election had been beyond combative; a riot nearly broke out when Booker showed up at a street basketball tournament that Sharpe James was already attending, and James called Booker “a Republican who took money from the KKK and the Taliban . . . who’s collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.” When James—who was constantly being investigated for various alleged corruptions—won the election by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, his victory seemed to cement Newark’s representation of “permanent poverty,” a culture of violence and corruption (at least if you subscribed to the New York Times).

Jack’s secret is not just to reward people for their profit contribution in the “great game of business.” It’s to put real numbers right in workers’ faces so they make better decisions every minute, every day, for every customer. I would go one step further, and maybe Jack already has. I would give employees a minor share in the overall company, but I would also then use software to measure each individual’s or team’s contributions after fair overhead allocations and direct costs. This would mean the back-line “servers” have fair revenue recognition of their efforts on behalf of the front-line “browsers” who actually serve the end customers. Is this not possible in a light-speed world of software and business metrics? We need more real business leaders and visionaries like Jack Stack, not BS Wall Street leverage artists or old-line corporate managers who merely streamline their top-down management systems while their workers wait for their unfunded retirement and death. And we need real educators, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who can make science understandable to everyday people. Most of all, we need people to love what they do so much that they won’t even think of retiring at age 63 or 65 or even 75. They’re so productive and happy that they don’t worry about a retirement that doesn’t make sense to them anymore, though it’s there if they have health challenges. They’re too busy satisfying their customers and creating new businesses to contemplate life without that fulfillment. They’re so focused on what they do that they’re like the champion basketball player who’s totally “in state” and one with his process. They’re certainly not bored or waiting to retire and do nothing!

You will find that success and attention to details, the smallest details, usually go hand in hand, in basketball and elsewhere in your life.

If handed an actual basketball, I would instantly cry. For me, doing sports was like meeting the Disney characters at Disney World. On TV I loved Mickey Mouse, but when I met the actual real-life Mickey, or rather his impersonator, and he tried to hug me in his warm fuzzy suit, I recoiled in fear.

Leslie Faber always enjoyed belonging to organizations and institutions. The basketball team, the softball team, the church youth group and the Girl Scouts; they all gave her a sense of significance. The uniforms she wore for the sports teams and the Girl Scouts conferred an official status, an attachment that the rest of her life sometimes seemed to lack.

If you’re always striving to achieve success that is defined by someone else, you’ll always be frustrated. Define your own success.

He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for the a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.

Based upon my detailed betting records and additional records provided by the sources, here is a snapshot of Phil’s gambling habit between 2010 and 2014: He bet $110,000 to win $100,000 a total of 1,115 times. On 858 occasions, he bet $220,000 to win $200,000. (The sum of those 1,973 gross wagers came to more than $311 million.) In 2011 alone, he made 3,154 bets—an average of nearly nine per day. On one day in 2011 (June 22), he made forty-three bets on major-league baseball games, resulting in $143,500 in losses. He made a staggering 7,065 wagers on football, basketball, and baseball. Phil didn’t let his playing in PGA tournaments get in the way of betting. Indeed, according to the 2010–2014 betting records, he made 1,734 wagers on games during twenty-nine events. This included seventy separate bets on baseball and preseason pro football during The Barclays tournament in August 2011 where he shot 8-under and tied for 43rd (he won $415,000 in bets that weekend).

Based upon my detailed betting records and additional records provided by the sources, here is a snapshot of Phil’s gambling habit between 2010 and 2014: He bet $110,000 to win $100,000 a total of 1,115 times. On 858 occasions, he bet $220,000 to win $200,000. (The sum of those 1,973 gross wagers came to more than $311 million.) In 2011 alone, he made 3,154 bets—an average of nearly nine per day. On one day in 2011 (June 22), he made forty-three bets on major-league baseball games, resulting in $143,500 in losses. He made a staggering 7,065 wagers on football, basketball, and baseball. Phil didn’t let his playing in PGA tournaments get in the way of betting. Indeed, according to the 2010–2014 betting records, he made 1,734 wagers on games during twenty-nine events. This included seventy separate bets on baseball and preseason pro football during The Barclays tournament in August 2011 where he shot 8-under and tied for 43rd (he won $415,000 in bets that weekend). On February 11, 2012, a busy college basketball Saturday, Phil blew himself up by running his betting losses to nearly $4 million, according to the gambling sources familiar with Phil’s other bets. Even so, he displayed an incredible ability to compartmentalize. He shot 64 the following day to win the AT&T Pro-Am at Pebble Beach while playing with, and demolishing, Tiger Woods, by eleven strokes.

Fellas, don’t put yourself in a position where you have to cheat. That’s the worst thing you can do as a Duke basketball player. If it happens, you’re going to be punished severely by the school—and I’ll support that punishment, whatever it is. But we should never get to that point. If you just say to me, ‘I’m stuck or I’m in trouble,’ then we’ll work on it together. We’ll be there to help you. But you also have to learn to help yourself.

Surfing is the first lifestyle sport. X Game staples like skateboarding and snowboarding were inspired directly by surfing. Being a surfer involves a different level of commitment from being a golfer or basketball player. Surfing is more than an athletic pursuit that you do a couple days a week at a course or in a gym. Even when surfers are out of the water, they are watching the weather, tides, and wind, monitoring distant swell patterns, and mentally tuning in the ocean. Surfing defines your life, in the same way that work—being a farmer or a carpenter or a blacksmith—used to define people’s lives. Forty years ago Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock called surfers “a signpost pointing to the future” for their embrace of a leisure-time “lifestyle,” and in this case Toffler was right.

When you first start working out, don’t go full out straight away. If you exhaust yourself straight off the bat, you’ll be adding fuel to the idea that you don’t like exercising. Take it steady and build up gradually, enjoying the training along the way. Exercise is movement. It’s not confined to the gym or a set block of workout time. It could be walking, swimming, playing basketball or any other activity that you enjoy that will get your heart rate up for 30 minutes.

Our family was not punctual; we arrived early to everything, knowing that it made my dad less vulnerable, sparing him from having to worry about finding a parking spot that didn’t require him to walk a long way or an accessible seat in the bleachers at one of Craig’s basketball games. The lesson being that in life you control what you can.

Leaders should be reliable without being predictable. They should be consistent without being anticipated.

Always respect your competition. Do disrespect your competition is to disrespect yourself.

My hunger is not for success, its for excellence, because when you attain excellence, success just naturally follows.

I never let a person's weakness get in the way of his strength.

Discipline is doing what you are supposed to do in the best possible manner at the time you are supposed to do it.

Let’s take another example; a son whose relationship with his father is troubled. The son feels that no matter what he does it never seems to be good enough for his father. I am grateful that most of the relationships in my life are really good. I’m grateful to my father for working hard so that I could have the education that he didn’t get to have. I’m grateful to my father for supporting our family through my childhood, because I didn’t have a clue then how much hard work and money it took to keep our family going. I’m grateful to my father for taking me to basketball every Saturday when I was a child. I’m grateful that my father is not as tough on me these days as he used to be in the past. I’m grateful that my father cares so much about me, because he wouldn’t be tough if he didn’t care so much. I’m grateful that through my relationship with my father I have learned to have compassion and a greater understanding with my children. I’m grateful to my father for showing me how important encouragement is in raising happy, confident children. I’m really grateful when I get to laugh with my father. Some people never got to do that because they didn’t have a father. And for others, who have lost their father, they will never have the chance to laugh with their father again. I am so truly grateful that I have my father, because amid the tough times, there have been good times, and there will be more good times ahead with my father.

Life might be unfair; you might be blindsided by bad luck or misfortune. Nobody knows better than a basketball coach that you might not reap the rewards of your hard work, and that you don't always get what you deserve. But with the support of other people, you get through it. We need one another, and if we stick together, we can get through anything.

My daughter Josie was nine years old when she played basketball for the first time. She’d get the ball and hold it and pivot to the right, to the left, back to the right, but seemed paralyzed by indecision. She would think and think and think about what to do—pass or shoot—but never act. At some point, you have to take the shot. Where in your life do you pivot and pivot, but never take the shot? Maybe you need to have a tough conversation, and you’ve thought about it over and over again. You’ve identified how to start the conversation, and you’ve worked through all your talking points. But when you think you’re ready, you pivot. You decide that the situation isn’t so bad after all. You’re too afraid to have that conversation. What if I miss the shot? What if the ball is intercepted? What if the conversation doesn’t go well? After you Pause and Think, you must Act. This is what will help you overcome obstacles and create the turning point. When you don’t Act, you don’t make progress. Research on the highest-performing teams shows it’s better for leaders to make a decision and act quickly rather than wait until all circumstances are perfect.

To encourage LeBron to persevere, I told him about my belief that great basketball shooters, like great golfers and great baseball hitters, are for the most part made rather than born.

But when basketball legend John Wooden’s father said to him, “Make each day your masterpiece,” Wooden knew something profound: Life is now. Life is not later on. And the more we hypnotize ourselves into thinking we have all the time in the world to do what we want to do, the more we sleepwalk past life’s finest opportunities. Self-motivation flows from the importance we attach to today.

Advice I’d give: Make sure you have something every day you’re looking forward to. Maybe it’s your job, maybe it’s a basketball game after work or a voice lesson or your writing group, maybe it’s a date. But have something every day that lights you up. It’ll keep your soul hungry to create more of these moments.

Fear of Failure: The great basketball player Kobe Bryant once said, “If you fail on Monday, the only way it’s a failure is if you decide to not progress from that. To me, that’s why failure does not exist. If I fail today, I’m going to learn something from that failure. I’m going to try again.

Six months later, though I still loathed the man, I changed my approach to the task list. I got up after the first wake-up call without delay. There would be no more early-morning baptisms for me. Instead, I focused on the details Sgt. Jack always noticed and finished each job right the first time. That was the only way I’d get any free time to play basketball. However, my new approach produced an unexpected side effect as well: a sense of pride in a job well done. In fact, that sense of pride came to mean more to me than basketball time. When I washed his car collection, a weekly assignment, I knew every drop of water had to be wiped away with a chamois before the first coat of wax. I used SOS pads to get the white walls gleaming and buffed the hell out of every panel. I also used Armor All on the dashboards and all the vinyl insides. I buffed the leather seats too. It bothered me if I saw streaks on the glass or chrome. I was annoyed if I missed a soiled spot or cut a corner here or there on any chore. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a sign that I was actually healing. When a half-assed job doesn’t bother you, it speaks volumes about the kind of person you are. And until you start feeling a sense of pride and self-respect in the work you do, no matter how small or overlooked those jobs might be, you will continue to half-ass your life. I knew I had every reason in the world to rebel and remain a lazy motherfucker. I also sensed that would only make me more miserable, so I adapted. But no matter how well I did or how fast I completed a given task, there were no atta’ boys or weekly allowance. No ice cream cones or surprise gifts, hugs, or high fives. In Sgt. Jack’s mind, I was finally doing what I should have been doing all along.

Life went on without her, the cruel bastard that it is. I wished it would have stopped. I wished a fucking semi truck would have taken me out and ended the misery. But slowly, time stretched on. I went to school, but I stopped dating. I played basketball, but I stopped surfing. I graduated. I moved back home. I moved on — at least, as much as I could. I convinced myself I would be alright without her. But the day the universe decided to put us in the same place again, I realized just how naïve I’d been.

From an early age, I learned life was strange. Not a lot of things made sense. One day, you could be happy because you made a few shots in a basketball game, and later that night, the police could be at your door with an aunt you hadn’t seen since you were in diapers, telling you there’s been an accident and that she’s going to be staying with you while everything’s sorted out. Things just happened. We have no control over it. And I find that terrifying.

Friendships, along with love, make life worth living.” —Coach K

Wooden often said a coach only made four or five real decisions during a game. “It disgusts me to see all these cartoons of raving maniac coaches,” he said. “There is far more overcoaching than undercoaching in basketball. It’s a great game, an intricate game, but we should not make it complicated.

if you do the following three things, you will be successful in major college basketball. If you don’t do them, it will be most difficult.” He didn’t say it would be impossible—typical of John Wooden—but he said it would be difficult. I was scrambling for my pen when he said, “Those three things are fairly simple: Number one, make certain, Dale, you always have better players than anybody you play. Now, with that locked up, make sure you always get the better players to put the team above themselves. And number three—this is very important, Dale Brown,” he said, “don’t try to be some coaching genius, or give the guys too much information, or too much stuff; always practice simplicity with constant repetition.

So what had Tia the mother learned from all this? You do your best. That’s all. You go in with the best intentions. You let them know that they are loved, but life is too random to do much more. You can’t really control it. Mike had this friend, a former basketball star, who liked to quote Yiddish expressions. His favorite was “Man plans, God laughs.” Tia had never really gotten that. She thought that it gave you an excuse to not try your hardest because, hey, God is going to mess with you anyway. But that wasn’t it. It was more about understanding that you could give it your all, give yourself the best chances, but control is an illusion. Or

Dan has what amounts to my entire life in the palm of his hand. He’ll see our chats. He’ll see the texts I sent to Beth about him and my plan. And what did I think was going to happen? Did I really think I could pull off some only-works-in-movies shit? “Do you think it could be possible that Dan didn’t mean to hit me with that basketball?” The question flies out of my mouth, and I don’t remember thinking about asking it. She scowls, looking me up and down. “Are you okay? I mean, I can tell you’re not. Was he that big of a jerk last night?” I shake my head and pick at my nail polish. It’s not chipping yet, but it’s inevitable, so why not just go ahead and get it over with? “No, I’m fine. He was fine. I just… I don’t know.” She puts a worried hand on my shoulder. “What happened, Z? Tell me.” I let my forehead hit the surface of my desk. It hurts. “He has my phone.” A bit of time passes where she doesn’t say anything. I just wait for the moment of realization to explode from her. “Holy shit! Don’t tell me your chat is on there!” There it is. I nod my head, which probably just looks like I’m rubbing it up and down on my desk. “Please tell me it’s password protected or something.” I shake my head, again seemingly nuzzling my desk. “Zelda, do you have your homework?” Mr. Drew asks from above me. I pull out my five hundred words on the importance of James Dean in cinema from my backpack without even looking and hand it to him. Mr. Drew has a big thing for James Dean. “Are you…okay, Zelda?” he asks a bit uncomfortably. Good old Mr. Drew. Concerned about his students but very much not well versed in actually dealing with them. I raise a hand and wave him off. “I’m good. As you were, Drew.” “Right. Okay then.” He moves on. Beth rubs my back. “It’s going to be all good in the hood, babe. Don’t worry. Dan won’t be interested in your phone. How did he get it, by the way?” I turn my head just enough to let her see my face fully. I’m not sure if she sees a woman at the end of her rope or a girl who has no idea what to do next, but she pulls her hand back like she just touched a disguised snake. I’m so not in the mood to describe the sequence of events that led up to the worst moment of my life, and she knows it.

I stared in awe at the Lincoln Memorial. If Honest Abe had come to life and somehow managed to lift his bony twenty-three-foot, four-inch frame from his throne, what would he say? What would he do? Would he break-dance? Would he pitch pennies against the curbside? Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy, that the people he freed were now slaves to rhythm, rap, and predatory lending, and that today his skill set would be better suited to the basketball court than the White House?

However, the biggest disappointment was Klay getting pulled over by a cop for a busted car light. The officer smelled marijuana in the vicinity and eventually found some in his car. The aforementioned event led to Klay’s arrest as well as a suspension for a game against the Bruins near the end of the season. Klay’s costly mistake ended up ruining the Cougars’ chance to make it to the NCAA tournament. His father was extremely disappointed in him since he had always taught him to stay away from such things not only in school, but as well as in his professional life. Mychal thought he had made a big enough impact to prevent his son from making foolish choices. Klay quickly regretted the situation and learned from his mistake. The team did qualify for the NIT, which was an exciting opportunity in itself.

Seeds of greatness My question for you is this: Are you really alive? Are you passionate about your life or are you stuck in a rut, letting the pressures of life weigh you down, or taking for granted what you have? You weren’t created to simply exist, to endure, or to go through the motions; you were created to be really alive. You have seeds of greatness on the inside. There’s something more for you to accomplish. The day you quit being excited about your future is the day you quit living. When you quit being passionate about your future, you go from living to merely existing. In the natural there may not be anything for you to be excited about. When you look into the future, all you see is more of the same. You have to be strong and say, “I refuse to drag through this day with no passion. I am grateful that I’m alive. I’m grateful that I can breathe without pain. I’m grateful that I can hear my children playing. I am grateful that I was not hurt in that accident. I’m grateful that I have opportunity. I’m not just alive--I’m really alive.” This is what Paul told Timothy in the Bible: “Stir up the gift, fan the flame.” When you stir up the passion, your faith will allow God to do amazing things. If you want to remain passionate, you cannot let what once was a miracle become ordinary. When you stared that new job you were so excited. You told all your friends. You knew it was God’s favor. Don’t lose the excitement just because you’ve had it for five years. When you fell in love after meeting the person of your dreams, you were on cloud nine. You knew this match was the result of God’s goodness. Don’t take it for granted. Remember what God has done. When your children were born, you cried for joy. Their births were miracles. You were so excited. Now you have teenagers and you’re saying, “God, why did you do this to me?” Don’t let what was once a miracle become so common that it’s ordinary. Every time you see your children you should say, “Thank you, Lord, for the gift you’ve given me.” We worked for three years to acquire the former Houston Rockets basketball arena for our church. During that time, it was still for sports and music events. When there wasn’t a ball game or concert, Victoria and I would come up late at night and walk around it. We’d pray and ask God for His favor. When the city leaders approved our purchase, we celebrated. It was a dream come true. Nearly ten years later, it’s easy to get used to. Holding services in such a huge building could become common, ordinary, and routine because we’ve been doing it so long now. But I have to admit that every time I walk in the building, I can’t help but say, “God, thank you. You have done more than I can ask or think.

No, what little inspiration I have in life comes not from any sense of racial pride. It stems from the same age-old yearning that has produced great presidents and great pretenders, birthed captains of industry and captains of football; that Oedipal yen that makes men do all sorts of shit we’d rather not do, like try out for basketball and fistfight the kid next door because in this family we don’t start shit but we damn sure finish it. I speak only of that most basic of needs, the child’s need to please the father. Many fathers foster that need in their children through a wanton manipulation that starts in infancy. They dote on the kids with airplane spins, ice cream cones on cold days, and weekend custody trips to the Salton Sea and the science museum. The incessant magic tricks that produced dollar pieces out of thin air and the open-house mind games that made you think that the view from the second-floor Tudor-style miracle in the hills, if not the world, would soon be yours are designed to fool us into believing that without daddies and the fatherly guidance they provide, the rest of our lives will be futile Mickey Mouseless I-told-ya-so existences. But later in adolescence, after one too many accidental driveway basketball elbows, drunken midnight slaps to the upside of our heads, puffs of crystal meth exhaled in our faces, jalapeño peppers snapped in half and ground into our lips for saying “fuck” when you were only trying to be like Daddy, you come to realize that the frozen niceties and trips to the drive-thru car wash were bait-and-switch parenting. Ploys and cover-ups for their reduced sex drives, stagnant take-home pay, and their own inabilities to live up to their father’s expectations. The Oedipal yen to please Father is so powerful that it holds sway even in a neighborhood like mine, where fatherhood for the most part happens in absentia, yet nevertheless the kids sit dutifully by the window at night waiting for Daddy to come home. Of course, my problem was that Daddy was always home.

Build a foundation for continuous growth What matters, then, is having a good education, good work habits, and a good attitude that gives you a foundation to build on. Popularity is about wanting people to like you, but happiness is about liking yourself. In most schools, the science fair is not the most popular event. Being in the math club isn’t nearly as cool as being on the football team. Some of my friends made fun of people on the debate team. But now they work for people who were on the debate team. Junior high and high school are critical times in our lives and our formative years. There’s so much emphasis on sports and not enough on studies. I love sports. I played sports growing up, still do. They teach discipline and teamwork and perseverance, and that’s all great. But we need to keep sports in perspective. Most of us are not going to play sports for a living. One in one million kids will play professional basketball. I don’t mean to depress you, but if you’re white it’s one in five million! The average professional football career is three and a half years. Even if you do make it, you still need a good foundation for life after football. When you study and learn, and take school seriously you may be called a bookworm, a geek, or a nerd, but don’t worry about those names. In a few years you’ll be called the boss. You’ll be called CEO, president, senator, pastor, or doctor. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone had summer homes next to each other in Florida. They were close friends and spent much of their summers together. Who you associate with makes a difference in how far you go in life. If your friends are Larry, Curly, and Moe, you may have fun, but you may not be going anywhere. The scripture says, “We should redeem the time.” You need to see time as a gift. God has given us 86,400 seconds each today.

I’m a huge basketball fan (Boston Celtics fan for life!),

Jimmy Valvano was a legendary college basketball coach and broadcaster. In June of 1992, he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. In March of the following year, Jimmy gave a powerful speech at the first ever ESPY awards, presented by ESPN. His message was just as simple as it was moving: “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” Eight weeks later, he passed away. In his speech, he also said this:   To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears―could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.   And finally, this:   Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.   There is no other reason to be alive than to enjoy it. So laugh, think, cry. Work hard. Celebrate your victories. Embrace the day. And don’t ever give up.

There is an old Yiddish phrase I find apropos—but not by choice: “Man plans, God laughs.” I am a prime example. My life was pretty much laid out for me. I was a basketball star my entire childhood, destined to be an NBA player for the Boston Celtics. But in my very first preseason game, Big Burt Wesson slammed into me and ruined my knee. I tried gamely to come back, but there is a big difference between gamely and effectively. My career was over before I hit the parquet floor. I

Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways.5.22 He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.” Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him. His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again. By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it. That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.

John Brooks.’ Immediately, I thought of the odds. First of just surviving in such a place, next of surviving and then becoming a cop. ‘Vertical ghettos, each one of them. Me and John used to say it was the only time when you had to take the elevator up when you were going to hell.’ I just nodded. This was out of my realm completely. ‘And that’s only if the elevators were working,’ he added. I realized that I never considered that Brooks might be a black man. There was no photo in the computer printouts and no reason to mention race in the stories. I had just assumed he was white and it was an assumption I would have to analyze later. At the moment, I was trying to figure out what Washington was trying to tell me by taking me here. Washington pulled into a lot next to one of the buildings. There were a couple of dumpsters coated with decades of graffiti slogans. There was a rusted basketball backboard but the rim was long gone. He put the car in park but left it running. I didn’t know if that was to keep the heat flowing or to allow us a quick getaway if needed. I saw a small group of teenagers in long coats, their faces as dark as the sky, scurry from the building closest to us, then cross a frozen courtyard and hustle into one of the other buildings. ‘At this point you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here,’ Washington said then. ‘That’s okay, I understand. A white boy like you.’ Again I said nothing. I was letting him run out his line. ‘See that one, third on the right. That was our building. I was on fourteen with my grand-auntie and John lived with his mother on twelve, one below us. They didn’t have no thirteen, already enough bad luck ’round here. Neither of us had fathers. At least ones that showed up.’ I thought he wanted me to say something but I didn’t know what. I had no earthly idea what kind of struggle the two friends must have had to make it out of the tombstone of a building he had pointed at. I remained mute. ‘We were friends for life. Hell, he ended up marrying my first girlfriend, Edna. Then on the department, after we both made homicide and trained with senior detectives for a few years, we asked to be partnered. And damn, it got approved. Story about us in the

By far, though, the best celebrity encounter either of us ever had belonged to Barbara. She met LeBron James at the Beijing Olympics, and after some joking around, he passed along his number. Henry and I had visions of a Bush-James basketball dynasty. We could see ourselves living comfortably in their guesthouse . . . But just like Justin Timberlake unplugged at the White House, it was not to be. Or, to quote U2, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

You’ve begun to master several techniques for controlling your anxiety. You’re learning the finer points of interaction and studying ways to apply your interactive skills. The next step is to add community resources—relevant agencies, groups, and organizations—to your self-help program. As you consider your particular needs, look to your own community for ways to enhance your social system: Parks and recreation departments, churches and synagogues, singles groups, self-help groups, clubs, volunteer organizations, business associations—there is an infinite array of resources to choose from. Contact your local chamber of commerce, consult newspapers for upcoming activities, and even inquire at area shops about any clubs or groups that share an interest (for example, ask at a garden center about a garden club, at a bookstore about a book club, and so on). Working through the exercises in this book is merely one component of a total self-help program. To progress from background knowledge to practical application, you must venture beyond your home and workplace (and beyond the confines of a therapist’s office, if you are in counseling). For people with social anxiety an outside system of resources is the best place to work on interactive difficulties. Here are three excellent reasons to use community resources: 1. To facilitate self-help. Conquering social anxiety necessitates interaction and involvement within the community, which is your laboratory. Using community resources creates a practical means of refining your skills and so moving forward on your individual map for change. 2. To diminish loneliness. Becoming part of the community provides the opportunity to develop personal and professional contacts that can enhance your life in many ways. 3. To network. Community involvement will not only give you the chance to improve your interactive skills, but will allow you to promote your academic or work life as well as your social life. Building connections on different levels can be the key. Any setting can provide a good opportunity for networking. In fact, I met the writer who helped me with this book in a fairly unlikely place—on the basketball court! A mutual friend introduced us, and when the subject of our professional interests came up, we saw the opportunity to work together on this project. You never know!

Sam Pickett, English teacher and former basketball coach at Willow Creek High School, scrounged for sleep in his tangled bed. He was thirty-six years old and he hadn’t a clue as to who he was or what his life was about. He bore a wound he couldn’t heal. He

It’s no secret that mainstream American habits are not always leading kids to educational and life success. In Sunset Park, Chinese kids are part of a counter-culture that is reinforced on a daily basis by family members, by other adults, by Chinese television shows, by local test-prep centers. Shopkeepers might ask whether they’ve done their homework. They don’t ask what they want to be when they grow up because the correct answer is all but universally shared. The role models for poor Chinese kids, observers point out, are not basketball players and rap stars but successful businesspeople and professionals. MOVING UP While most eyes have been on the shifting demographics of places like Bush-wick and Greenpoint, the Chinese have been redefining several of southwest Brooklyn’s legendary white ethnic neighborhoods near Sunset Park.

Basketball is not just a game its a way of living if you apply it to everyday life.

And late late late when he thought they had gone—or he had gone— to sleep maybe, to a place inside his head where they couldn’t reach him, in the dark, he opened his eyes, and next to him sat Anthony. Alexander shut his eyes, not wanting Anthony to see all the things he was carrying, and Anthony leaned deeply in and lowered his forehead onto Alexander’s bandaged chest. “Dad,” he whispered, “I swear to God, you have to stop it. You’ve been doing this for weeks now, turning away every time you look at me. Please. Stop. I’m hurt enough. Think of yourself, remember your-self—did you want my mother to turn her face from you when you came back from war? Please. I don’t give a fuck about the arm. I don’t. I’m not like Nick Moore. I’m like Mom. I’ll adjust, little by little. I’m just glad to be alive, to be back. I thought my life was over. I didn’t think I would ever come back, Dad,” said Anthony, raising his head. “What are you so upset about? It wasn’t even my good arm.” He smiled lightly. “I never liked it. Couldn’t pitch ball with it, couldn’t write with it. Certainly, unlike you, couldn’t shoot fucking Dudley with it. Now come on. Please.” “Yes,” whispered Alexander. “But you’ll never play guitar again.” And other things you will never do. Play basketball. Pitch. Hold your newborn baby in your palms. Anthony swallowed. “Or go to war again.” He broke off. “I know. I have some adjusting to do. It is what it is. Mom says this, and you should listen to her. She says I got away with my life, and I’m going to do just fine. All we want is for you to be all right,” Anthony said. “That’s all any of us ever wanted.” “Antman,” said Alexander, his hand on his son’s lowered head, his wounded chest drawn and quartered, “you’re a good kid.

Are you going to show integrity only when someone is watching you—or are you going to show it all the time?

Get it together, I told myself.  This isn’t life or death. It’s just college basketball. Nobody was going to die from what I was about

Business is a basketball game. The more tricks you know, the more points you score.

Toward the end of Carmel's life, the perception of super talls shifted dramatically, thanks largely to televised NBA games, By 1975, pretty much everyone had seen super tall people on TV, in the context of being celebrated in front of sold-out basketball arenas. This new frame of reference could not have been more positive. By 1995 Shaquille O'Neal was known as The Man of Steel, not the Traveling Human Giant. The idea of super tall people as freaks was replaced by the idea of super tall people as amazing athletes.

I believe you should do three things every single day of your life,” he said. “One, you should laugh. Two, you should think. Pause and think about your life. And third, you should cry. Get yourself into a state of emotion where you shed a tear. If you do all three of those things—laugh, think, and cry—well, that’s one heck of a day.” Eight

Tree was lonesome, and the adjustment to campus life was not proving to be an easy one for her. She missed the intimacy of her neighborhood back in Columbia, where she knew everyone she passed on the street. She had the typical freshman sensation of being overwhelmed. The lectures were hard to follow, a lot of the terms and subjects were new to her, and she struggled to take notes at the collegiate pace. She tried to keep up as best she could, but it seemed like she was always behind. She studied for two weeks for her first biology test. She was afraid of failing. Semeka Randall, in the next bed, heard Tree weeping. Semeka slid out of bed and padded back to Tamika and Ace’s room—she was about to cry herself. She said, “Tree’s crying and it’s her birthday. We have to do something.” The three of them spent all afternoon planning a surprise. They bought a vanilla cake with white icing; they blew up eighteen balloons and decorated the back bedroom with them; they strung crepe paper, and ordered pizzas. Word got back to me that Tree was having a hard day. In the afternoon, I called the freshmen suite. I sang “Happy Birthday” to Tree, in my voice that was hoarse from yelling at her. That cheered her up some. That evening, Ace, Semeka, and Tamika acted like it was just another night in their dorm room. They talked about going out, and decided against it. Semeka said, “Let’s just eat pizzas.” Tree thought, “There goes my birthday.” When the pizza arrived, Tamika told Tree to stay in the front room. After a minute, they called Tree into the back. She walked into a room darkened except for a flaming birthday cake. It was the final icebreaker. Tree beamed. The three freshmen circled Tree, and began to sing. Semeka started first. But she didn’t sing “Happy Birthday.” She sang their favorite song from the film Waiting to Exhale. As Semeka sang a verse, the others joined in. “Count on Me,” they sang. Tree, touched, started crying again.

I’m sure you can bench press more than me, carry a football a whole lot farther, you can probably even beat me up in a fair fight, I don’t doubt it. But this ain’t a football field, a basketball court, or a schoolyard. And it’s sure as fuck not a fair fight, if such a thing exists. This is the real shit we’re talking about and nobody, nobody fights fair in the real shit. You want to be in my business, maybe you should ask yourself, are you willing to do any of the things I mentioned, are you willing to get neck deep in the real shit? Or, even more, ask yourself if you’re willing to risk having any of those specific actions directed at you? You got a pretty good life here. Ready to flush that shit right down the toilet? Because you might have to, you know. That’s the price of playing this game. You sure want to take that kind of chance? Because if you’re not, we know right here and now who the real bitch is, don’t we?

Everyone remain calm! Line up with your teachers and proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest exits.” I’m not sure who she was talking to. It looked like the whole school was already out here in the hall. And in the parking lot. And on the soccer field. And on the basketball courts.

A healthy character means developing a positive outlook on life no matter what serious situation you’re facing. Well-respected basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be more concerned about your character than your reputation. Your reputation is how others perceive you; your character is who you really are.” Character means having a healthy, positive attitude in the wake of job loss or any life challenge. Clement Stone said, “There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.” Thomas Jefferson said, “Nothing can stop a person with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; but nothing on earth can help the person with the wrong mental attitude.

Every basketball wimp needs a lesson, and you seem to think you’re somewhere above your true station in life.

I would tell players to relax and never think about what’s at stake. Just think about the basketball game. If you start to think about who is going to win the championship, you’ve lost your focus.

A fierce hatred of embarrassment ruled a surprising amount of the life of Moses Malone, the Hall of Fame basketball center.

Sometimes in life, you make a mistake and there’s no buts and no explanations … There’s no peace in ‘I’m sorry, but.’ You can’t find peace until you truly understand that the only thing to say is, ‘I’m sorry,’ period. ~ John Lucas, as quoted in ‘The Punch’ by John Feinstein

Can we pause the bickering for more important matters, please? Look. There’s a time-out on the court.” Which meant more Coach Romano camera time. The three women focused on the TV. “OMG,” Sarah said, the slang usage obviously for Nic’s benefit. On the screen, the man in question had slipped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and he was holding a basketball in a one-handed grip. “Look at the size of those hands.” Sage fanned her face. “Think of what he could do with them.” “At the risk of sounding crude, this is the first time in my life my boobs ever wished they were a basketball,” Nic observed. Out in the hallway, something heavy thumped to the floor. Nic recognized the voice that muttered the epithet that immediately followed. Gabe Callahan. She glanced in the wall mirror and smoothed her flyaway hair, catching Sarah’s knowing smirk as she did so. She stuck out her tongue at her best friend and sent up a little prayer that his hearing wasn’t all that sharp. “Gabe?” Sarah called out. “Everything all right?” Footsteps approached and he came into sight, pausing in the doorway. He wore a blue-and-gray plaid flannel shirt tucked into a snug pair of faded Levi’s. He had a stained and scruffy pair of lined leather work gloves tucked into a back pocket of his jeans, and his steel-toed boots showed plenty of wear. He might be stopping for dinner at the Bristlecone most nights these days, but he still hadn’t managed to find his way to the barbershop. His hair brushed his shoulders now, curling slightly on the ends. And dang it, her fingers itched to play with those thick silken strands. Until he turned a wickedly amused gaze her way and dashed her hopes about his hearing. “Sorry about the noise. That piece of lumber slipped right out of my hands. You know …” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I have to tell you that, while men are often accused of thinking with body parts other than their brains, this is the first time I’ve ever heard women admit they have parts that think for themselves, too.” He heard, all right. Nic closed her eyes and flushed with embarrassment. They not only think for themselves, they blush. Sage saved her by laughing. “You like basketball, Gabe?” “Not the same way you ladies do, apparently.

She wasn’t my type, though I really don’t have a type. I’ve spent my entire life traveling overseas. My parents worked for a charitable foundation in places like Laos and Peru and Sierra Leone. I don’t have any siblings. It was exciting and fun when I was a kid, but it got tiresome and difficult as I grew older. I wanted to stay in one place. I wanted to make some friends and play on one basketball team and, well, meet girls and do teenage stuff. It’s hard to do that when you’re backpacking in Nepal. This

Pregame jitters hadn’t been a part of Myron’s existence for over a decade, and he knew now what he’d always suspected: this nerve-jangled high was directly connected to basketball. Nothing else. He had never experienced anything similar in his business or personal life. Even violent confrontations—a perverted high if ever there was one—were not exactly like this. He had thought this uniquely sports-related sensation would ebb away with age and maturity, when a young man no longer takes a small event like a basketball game and blows it into an entity of near biblical importance, when something so relatively insignificant in the long run is no longer magnified to epic dimensions through the prism of youth. An adult, of course, can see what is useless to explain to a child—that one particular school dance or missed foul shot would be no more than a pang in the future. Yet here Myron was, comfortably ensconced in his thirties and still feeling the same heightened and raw sensations he had known only in youth. They hadn’t gone away with age. They’d just hibernated—as Calvin had warned him—hoping for a chance to stir, a chance that normally never came in one man’s lifetime. Were

Unfortunately, we have become a civilization of pussies. To give you an example, do you remember a news story on Yahoo! about a high school basketball team that scored over 100 points, and the other team had less than 20 points? The “officials” in charge said that the winning team was wrong for embarrassing the other team like that. I remember the good ole’ days when sports were meant to be won, and the winning team got the glory. Instead of that happening now, we are supposed to make every kid feel like they did a good job even if they sucked ass. Sorry, but they were losers that day. Does that make them losers in life? Not unless they bitch and whine about it not being fair that they lost by that difference in points.   If

Shura, I did quit. I want you to quit, too.” He sat and considered her. His brow was furled. “You’re working too hard,” she said. “Since when?” “Look at you. All day in the dank basement, working in cellars... what for?” “I don’t understand the question. I have to work somewhere. We have to eat.” Chewing her lip, Tatiana shook her head. “We still have money— some of it left over from your mother, some of it from nursing, and in Coconut Grove you made us thousands carousing with your boat women.” “Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Anthony, looking up from his coloring. “Yes, Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Alexander, smiling. “My point is,” Tatiana went on, poker-faced, “that we don’t need you to break your back as if you’re in a Soviet labor camp.” “Yes, and what about your dream of a winery in the valley? You don’t think that’s back-breaking work?” “Yes . . .” she trailed off. What to say? It was just last week in Carmel that they’d had that wistful conversation. “Perhaps it’s too soon for that dream.” She looked deeply down into her plate. “I thought you wanted to settle here?” Alexander said in confusion. “As it turns out, less than I thought.” She coughed, stretching out her hand. He took it. “You’re away from us for twelve hours a day and when you come back you’re exhausted. I want you to play with Anthony.” “I do play with him.” She lowered her voice. “I want you to play with me, too.” “Babe, if I play with you any more, my sword will fall off.” “What sword, Dad?” “Anthony, shh. Alexander, shh. Look, I don’t want you to fall asleep at nine in the evening. I want you to smoke and drink. I want you to read all the books and magazines you haven’t read, and listen to the radio, and play baseball and basketball and football. I want you to teach Anthony how to fish as you tell him your war stories.” “Won’t be telling those any time soon.” “I’ll cook for you. I’ll play dominoes with you.” “Definitely no dominoes.” “I’ll let you figure out how I always win.” A Sarah Bernhardt-worthy performance. Shaking his head, he said slowly, “Maybe poker.” “Absolutely. Cheating poker then.” Rueful Russian Lazarevo smiles passed their faces. “I’ll take care of you,” she whispered, the hand he wasn’t holding shaking under the table. “For God’s sake, Tania... I’m a man. I can’t not work.” “You’ve never stopped your whole life. Come on. Stop running with me.” The irony in that made her tremble and she hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Let me take care of you,” Tatiana said hoarsely, “like you know I ache to. Let me do for you. Like I’m your nurse at the Morozovo critical care ward. Please.” Tears came to her eyes. She said quickly, “When there’s no more money, you can work again. But for now... let’s leave here. I know just the place.” Her smile was so pathetic. “Out of my stony griefs, Bethel I’ll raise,” she whispered. Alexander was silently contemplating her, puzzled again, troubled again. “I honestly don’t understand,” he said. “I thought you liked it here.” “I like you more.

STEP 11  –  Spiritual Awareness We pray and think about ourselves, praying only for the strength to do what is right. We have always been a People of prayer. In our old ways, we prayed when the sun came up, we prayed when we picked the herbs that became our medicine, we prayed for a good harvest, and we prayed when the buffalo or deer was taken so our people might live. We are still a People of prayer. Something inside of us becomes alert when an Elder prays before a gathering. At home, there is prayer before a basketball game or a graduation. Step 11 is about re-awakening our gift of prayer and using it for sobriety, recovery and especially on the Wellbriety journey that will last our whole life. Many

I went to Planned Parenthood the week I turned sixteen because I was terrified almost every day of my life. I went to Planned Parenthood because I was poor and prey, and girls had told me where the building was because they, too, were afraid of the same thing: We were certain we’d be raped at some point, and we didn’t want to have babies because of that. We didn’t want to have to marry our rapists. But I was a girlfriend by then. My boyfriend was a large man. No one who knew us would bother me. I was also endlessly distracted by story and curiosity, and would talk to anyone, at the movie theater, at basketball games, at parties. Our senior year, at a New Year’s Eve party in 1977, in a house near the foothills, more than a hundred of us drinking and dancing inside and outside, I saw a young man maybe twenty-five stagger across the lawn, his shirt unbuttoned, his long black hair in Bee Gee waves around his

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Even for a victorious man, to enter the duel came with consequences. Why was one's honor even considered in threat? To place oneself in the position to have to put one's life at risk for one's honor meant that poor choices had been made to expose oneself. Look around at male honor today. No brotherhood. Sniping and insults that have moved from the physical realm to the digital. Even the violence in our urban hellscapes has devolved from hand-to-hand combat to drive-by shootings. Youths defend supposed honor, for they hold nothing else of value, by shooting at one another's homes, basketball courts, or porches, catching innocents caught in the crossfire. Their women and children suffer the fatal blows that should be dealt the hood warriors. This is a symptom of lost honor among all men.

How can intermediate level beings see or experience this artificial life? The answer is that we already have virtual reality goggles through which we can view, in three dimensions, sporting events on the opposite side of the world. Today you can purchase equipment that enables you to watch and listen to a professional basketball game that takes place in the United States while you are in your bedroom in Japan, wearing the virtual reality goggles and headphones. Imagine the authenticity, accuracy and realism of virtual reality that a civilization a thousand years more advanced than us can produce!

A Leader is a Reader .

Anytime we could, we played basketball. Even the smallest town had a high school gym, and if there wasn’t time for a proper game, Reggie and I would still roll up our sleeves and get in a round of H-O-R-S-E while waiting for me to go onstage. Like any true athlete, he remained fiercely competitive. I sometimes woke up the day after a game of one-on-one barely able to walk, though I was too proud to let my discomfort show. Once we played a group of New Hampshire firefighters from whom I was trying to secure an endorsement. They were standard weekend warriors, a bit younger than me but in worse shape. After the first three times Reggie stole the ball down the floor and went in for thunderous dunks, I called a time-out. “What are you doing?” I asked. “What?” “You understand that I’m trying to get their support, right?” Reggie looked at me in disbelief. “You want us to lose to these stiffs?” I thought for a second. “Nah,” I said. “I wouldn’t go that far. Just keep it close enough that they’re not too pissed.” Spending time with Reggie, Marvin, and Gibbs, I found respite from the pressures of the campaign, a small sphere where I wasn’t a candidate or a symbol or a generational voice or even a boss, but rather just one of the guys. Which, as I slogged through those early months, felt more valuable than any pep talk. Gibbs did try to go the pep-talk route with me at one point as we were boarding another airplane at the end of another interminable day, after a particularly flat appearance. He told me that I needed to smile more, to remember that this was a great adventure and that voters loved a happy warrior. “Are you having any fun?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Anything we can do to make this more fun?” “No.” Sitting in the seat in front of us, Reggie overheard the conversation and turned back to look at me with a wide grin. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I’m having the time of my life.” It was—although I didn’t tell him that at the time. —

Diversity always makes me happy.

The way you channel energy determines the course of your life.

Perfection isn't possible. Aiming for perfection will make you crazy. I was crazy.

There’s this space in our lives that we attempt to fill with more space and the nothingness grows larger while our lives get smaller, a fact we can’t seem to accept very well. So, we take walks and we work and we go to movies and basketball games and church and we Exist in our nothing lives and when we die a speech is made and we are forgotten once again, only more permanently this time.

(...) sometimes, the greatest luxury to possess is no choice.

Anthony Cafaro has been a sports fan his whole life. His favorite teams include the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays. Anthony Cafaro played travel baseball and golf in high school and still remains active in recreational basketball. As a finance major, he looks forward to a lucrative career with a strong company.

If a Starbucks drink could be a church, it would be LifeChurch.TV

Sony paid both stars handsomely for their consistent success: $20 million against 20 percent of the gross receipts, whichever was higher, was their standard compensation. They also received as much as $5 million against 5 percent for their production companies, where they employed family and friends. Sony also provided Happy Madison and Overbrook with a generous overhead to cover expenses—worth about $4 million per year. To top it off, Sandler and Smith enjoyed the perks of the luxe studio life. Flights on a corporate jet were common, with family members and friends often invited along. On occasion, Smith’s entourage and its belongings necessitated the use of two jets for travel to premieres. Knowing that Sandler was a huge sports fan, Sony regularly sent him and his pals to the Super Bowl to do publicity. In addition to enjoying the best tickets and accommodations, they had a private basketball court to play on, which the studio rented for them. Back at the Sony lot, the basketball court was renamed Happy Madison Square Garden in the star’s honor. When anybody questioned the wide latitude and endless indulgence given to Sandler and Smith, Sony executives had a standard answer: “Will and Adam bought our houses.

Her life was a junkyard of failed relationships, but she didn’t let that stop her. Even at their big ages, Penny looked for love under every flowerpot and basketball cap. Claudine could never understand what hole could be so deep it needed such a stream of men to fill.

Physically, he’s changed again. The face more drawn, the skin more wan, and he’s gained weight in the oddest way. His face, arms, legs, and butt are skinny, but his stomach – his stomach has ballooned. He looks three months’ pregnant. His belly is huge and tight as a drum, as though his shirt has been buttoned with difficulty over a basketball. Cassavetes is a man of immense ego but little vanity. He either won’t or can’t get that stomach down, but he does nothing (like wear looser shirts) to hide it. He intends to play the belly as part of his Love Streams costume. The film’s Robert Harmon will be weighed down with Cassavetes’ belly, and on Robert Harmon it will be an emblem of the dead weight of his life. Cassavetes

Horseball This English-style team sport is like polo, football, and basketball all in one. It is a fast, mounted competition where a ball is carried by hand and shot through a high net to score points. During the competition, riders use the weight of their horses to shove their opponents out of the playing area without unseating themselves.

Stevie. Curly hair and amazing ass. Won’t sleep with me, but I hope she changes her mind.”  Scrolling to the Denver tab, she clicks on it. “Stevie. Has an attitude. Likes basketball and is down to eat burgers.” She exits out, finding Washington DC next. “Stevie,” she continues. “Best sex of my life.”  She keeps going to Calgary. “Stevie. Snuck her into my hotel room to watch movies with me all night.” San Jose. “Stevie. Insane blowjob in the shower. Wore my T-shirt to bed.” Next, she finds Vancouver. “Stevie. Came to my game. My favorite person to hang out with.

When it’s my turn, I fill my plate with rice, shami kabob, lentils, and butter chicken, skipping the cauliflower and salad, and pile the naan high before carefully carrying it downstairs to the basement. Rabiya, Yusuf, and the other kids are already camped in front of the TV with their food. Mustafa joins a few minutes later, plopping down on our beat-up leather sofa next to Yusuf. “There’s nothing good on,” Yusuf announces after flipping through all the channels. “Isn’t there a basketball game?” Mustafa asks. “Nooo!” Rabiya whines. “I want SpongeBob,” a little boy named Jamal says, chewing on a piece of naan. “How about we tell scary stories?” Yusuf suggests. “No way,” Rabiya refuses. “Last time I had nightmares for days.” I agree. Yusuf tells the scariest stories ever. The worst one was about severed hands of bodies that were dug up from graves. The hands came to life and would tickle people to death. I still think about that whenever we pass a graveyard.