Tournaments Are Won In Preparation

Playing in a tournament is almost an anticlimax.  Tournaments are won and lost in preparation.  Playing in them is just going through the motions.

-Ben Hogan

Pg XII

Pressure

Pressure comes when someone calls on you to perform a task for which you are unprepared.

-Tony LaRussa

Pg XIII

Responding In The Second Half

How you respond to challenges in the second half determines what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser.

Pg XIV

Hope

Hope is not a strategy.

-General Tommy Franks

Pg XIII

The Ladder

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

-Ayn Rand

Pg XVI

Coaching

Coaching gives one a chance to be successful as well as significant.  The difference between those two is that when you die, your success comes to an end.  When you are significant, you continue to help others be successful long after you are gone.  Significance lasts many lifetimes.  That is why people teach, why people lead, and why people coach.

Pg XVII

Blessings

At age five, I got my first Coke.  It was so good that I wanted it to last.  Chances were pretty good that it might be three or four years before I would get another one.  So after a few sips, I put the bottle in the windosill (we didn't have an icebox, much less a refrigerator).  Unfortunately, the next morning the soda was flat and stale and had to be thrown away.  As a five-year-old, I suddenly understood that you should enjoy life's blessings, no matter how small, when you can, because they won't last forever.

-Pg 6

WIN Strategy

WIN is an acronym for "What's important now?" the question I have always asked myself when facing tough decisions.  No matter what situation you are in, you should constantly ask yourself, "What's important now?"  If you have a test in the morning, but your buddies have tickets to a late night concert, "What's important now?"  If your team has an important game on Saturday and you need plenty of rest, but your roommate asks you to go clubbing, "What's important now?"  In some instances, the answers are easy.  If my car is in a ditch, what I'm having for dinner tonight isn't important.  If my wife comes home with a bad report from her doctor, the score I shot on the golf course tumbles down the importance list.  When I was a young child and my father was out of work for a week, leaving no food in the house, the question "What's important now?" had an easy answer: get out, work, hustle, and do whatever it took to survive.  The WIN strategy is as applicable in times of prosperity as it is during a depression.

Pg 7

True Heroes Walk With Quiet Confidence

This sparked my lasting distaste for excessive celebrations and "look at me" exploits, whether by athletes, politicians, or business people.  If one of our players scored a touchdown, I wanted him to walk away as if it were no big deal.  "You want it to look like you're used to being in the end zone," I would always say.  But my message was much broader.  What I was really telling those players was that true heroes walk the walk with quiet confidence.  They do the job, and then let the job they've done speak for itself.

Pgs 11-12

Slow And Weak

I was an eighty-pound wonder boy who made up for his lack of size by being slow and weak.

Pg 13

Honor Your Commitments

When the halfback came towards me I froze.  Everything I'd practiced, everything my uncle had tried to teach me, every drill I'd worked on, flew out of my brain and was replaced by fear.

When I came back to the sidelines, I saw something in my uncle Lou's eyes I had never seen before.  He was hurt and disappointed, wounded that I would give up on a play.  My teammates felt the same way.  Not many of them said so out loud, but they didn't have to.  I knew that I had disappointed them, and they knew that I knew.  All the excuses in the world wouldn't negate the fact that I had turned away from my responsibilities.  In hindsight I had no business being on the field.  I was nine years old playing against kids who shaved in the morning and had five o'clock shadows by kickoff.  But that was no excuse for my failure to honor the commitment I had made to my coaches and teammates.

I realized that day, and it has stuck with me for the rest of my playing days and well into my coaching career, that the mental anguish you feel from letting down your coaches and teammates far exceeds any physical pain that might be inflicted on the football field.

Pg 14

Bad Coach

To ask someone to do something he is incapable of doing isn't making him a better player: it makes you look like a bad coach.

-Pg 15

The Difference Is Attitude

What's the difference between a 0-0 score and being tied at 28? 

I'll tell you: the only difference is attitude.  If every player on our team believes he is going to beat the man across from him on the next play, and the play after that, and the play after that, we're in no worse shape now than we were throughout most of the first quarter.

Pg XIV

Prove Them Wrong

I wanted to do well academically at college, but given my history in the classroom, I wasn't sure that my "want" was going to cut it.  Then I had what I would later realize was a life-changing experience.  In the summer before I was to leave for Kent State, while walking through the Wellington Neighborhood Grocery, I heard a couple of my mother's friends talking one aisle over.

Mrs. Hoback said, "I can't believe Anne Marie Holtz is wasting her money sending that boy, Lou, to college."

Mrs. Toft then said, "I know what you mean.  She took a night job and everything.  It's such a waste."

They didn't know I'd overheard them, since I was one aisle over, but those comments cut me deeply and burned inside me throughout my freshman year.  I knew that my mother was sacrificing for me, but to have her friends, the people in my town, think that I was not worth the effort, that I was bound to fail, turned my wounded feelings into something quite different.  My "want" to do well became a fiery determination.  I would do whatever it took to pass, especially as a freshman, a year when the adjustment to college life can take its toll.

This was a turning point for me for several reasons: I could have felt sorry for myself after the criticism.  I could have said, "Those women are probably right.  I've got no business going to school.  I shouldn't waste my mother's time and money."  I could have used the comments as an excuse the first time I encountered a tough class or a hard-nosed professor, or the first time I struggled through a difficult test.  After all, I wasn't supposed to be there anyway.  But I didn't go that route.  Sure, the criticism stung, but I internalized it, made it a challenge, a competition with those who thought I couldn't make it, even though they had no idea I was competing against them. 

Although I didn't know it at the time, I owe those two women a lot of thanks.  My objective was to prove them wrong by passing, staying in school, and getting my degree.

Pgs 26-27

Give Your Best Effort And You Will Never Be Embarrassed

Some friends thought I might embarrass myself trying to play college football, but my attitude was that you couldn't embarrass yourself if you gave your best effort.  I believed I could succeed on the football field, just as I had in the classroom.  Nothing was more important than belief in myself.

Pg 32

Don't Swim A Mile And A Half Because You Don't Believe You Can Swim A Mile

The previous summer I'd been taught a valuable lesson about taking on new challenges, one I've tried to teach to every athlete I've coached.  My seven best friends and I were swimming in the Ohio River, as we were prone to do on a hot summer days, when one of our group came up with the bright idea that we should swim all the way across the river, about a mile at that point.  Whoever finished last would walk back across the bridge, get the car, and pick everybody else up.

"I'm not going," Nevitt Stockdale said.

"What do you mean you're not going?" I asked.

"I can't swim that far."

"You can make it," I told Nevitt.  "And if you can't, I'll save you."

"You would do that for me?"

"Of course.  You've got my word."

I was motivated to have Nevitt join us because he was the only one I knew I could beat.  In a race not to finish last, having one guy you can beat is a plus.

Everything went according to plan for the first three-quarters of a mile.  Nevitt kept up, but showed no signs of beating me to the finish.  I didn't worry about who was winning.  All I cared about was not being last.

Then, out of the blue, Nevitt said: "I can't make it."

"You can do it," I said.

"No, I can't.  Save me, Lou."

I'd promised him I would save him, given him my word of honor.  All of our other friends had already made it across and were sunning themselves on the riverbank.  Only Nevitt and I remained in the water.  So I did the only thing I could do: I left him there to drown and continued swimming to the opposite shore.

Nevitt thrashed about for a minute before doing the only thing he thought he could do to save his life: he turned around and swam back to where we'd started.  He ended up swimming a mile and a half because he didn't believe he could swim a mile.

Pgs 32-33

Blueprint For Success

Life provides all of us with a series of choices.  The choices we make determine how successful we are.  When you acknowledge that you and only you are responsible and accountable for those choices you make, and when you refuse to blame others for the choices you have made, you have in your hands the blueprint for success.  When you allow others to choose your path so that you can then blame someone else when things don't go your way, you are fooling no one and cheating no one but  yourself.  When you accept the fact that you are in your present condition, good or bad, because of the choices that you have made, you will then find yourself capable of changing your situation by making better choices.

No one but you determines your success in life.  Making the right choices paves your way.

Pg 39

Only You Determine How You Feel

Shortly before graduating college my first real girlfriend, Edie, broke up with me.  After graduating I celebrated by going on a nine-day drinking binge, my first and last such excursion.  Despite many temptations, including some outright bribes from my fraternity brothers, I kept my promise to my mother that I would never drink while I was away at school.  But as soon as graduation ceremonies were over, I set about drowning my sorrows in hole-in-the-wall juke joints in and around Akron.  It was an immature and ridiculous act, but for more than a week I was drunk more hours than I was sober.

My tenth morning of waking up feeling like the New York Giants' backfield had run over my head and left clumps of sod in my mouth, I sat up, rubbed my aching eyes, and said to myself: "What on earth are you doing?  Are you going to let someone else, someone who doesn't care about you, affect you like this?"  The answer was obvious.  You can't let someone else determine your happiness.  Only you can be responsible for your feelings.  My choice was either to make the best of the situation I was in, or to wallow in self pity and stay drunk the rest of my life.  I would never again let anyone else set the parameters of my happiness.  If you control nothing else in your life, you do control your feelings.  You can choose to face your circumstances, no matter how cheerful or bleak, with happiness or with despondency.  No one can take that choice away from you.  I chose to move on with a positive spirit. 

Pgs 44-45

No Matter How Bad Someone Has It, There Are Others Who Have It Worse. Be Grateful For What You Have

I also took graduate courses to earn an M.A. degree, which kept me busy.  I had gotten my undergraduate degree in history, but was getting my master's in physical education, in part because the athletic administration office and the physical ed department were in the same building, and the university had me teaching physical education to handicapped children- kids with spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, and other physical challenges.  Dr. Red Marx was my superior.  What a great man.  At first I was apprehensive because I'd never been exposed to people, especially children, with such conditions.  It didn't take long for me to realize that they were just like any other children emotionally, and it took even less time for them to have a profound impact on me.  I became angry at myself for the whining and self-pity I'd displayed at various times in my life.  Sure, I'd gone through some tough times, but I wasn't confined to a wheelchair!  I could sit upright and eat on my own!  Working with those children made me realize how lucky most of us are.  It also shortened my patience for people who complain about trivial slights. 

No matter how bad someone has it, there are others who have it worse.  Remembering that makes life a lot easier, and allows you to take pleasure in the blessings you have been given.

Pgs 56-57

Persistence

Persistence is, in my mind, the quality that is most critical to success and happiness.  Nothing takes the place of persistence. 

Talent won't; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. 

Genius wont do it; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence alone is omnipotent.  Everybody of my generation knows that Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs.  I am one of the few who also know that he struck out more than thirteen hundred times. 

Pg 57