Moment of Truth (1980 NBA Finals and 1987 NBA Finals) – 1) Magic Johnson in game 6 plays center with Kareem injured and scores 42 to win the series against Dr. J and the Sixers. 2) Magic makes a stunning 12 foot hook shot over Kevin Mchale with seconds remaining to win game 4 of the finals. The Lakers beat the Celtics in 6 games. Magic has 5 rings.
Moment of Truth (1987 Eastern Conference Finals) – Game 5, Larry Bird steals the ball from Isaiah Thomas and passes to Dennis Johnson with seconds remaining to win by 1 point. The Celtics go on to win that series in 7 games. Larry has 3 rings.
Moment of Truth (1988 NBA Finals) - Isiah Thomas scores 25 points in the 4th quarter with a sprained ankle to help keep his team in game 6 against the Lakers. Although the Pistons lost the game and the series, I have seen few single game efforts to match his. Isiah has 2 rings.
Moment of Truth (1994 NBA Finals) – Down 3-2 to Pat Riley and the NY Knicks, Hakeem Olajawon leads his team to two straight victories to beat Pat Ewing’s team. Hakeem has 2 rings.
Moment of Truth (Any Year, Michael Jordan) – No need to list his achievements as MJ or Air Jordan ALWAYS performed when it mattered. 6 rings.
Moment of Truth (2000 Western Conference Finals) – Down by 15 points with just over 10 minutes to play in the 4th quarter of game 7 to Portland, Kobe and Shaq rally back to win the game. They go on to win their first NBA championship. Kobe and Shaq have 3 consecutive rings.
There are many more of the aforementioned moments but one thing they have in common is that GREAT players perform in the clutch.
Let’s look at Dirk:
Moment of Truth (2006 NBA Finals) – Up 2-0 on an unimpressive Miami team and leading by 14 points in the 4th quarter in Game 3, Dirk does NOTHING to help his team close out that game. If they win that game, the series is essentially over and Dallas becomes NBA champions. 0 for 1 in his quest for a ring.
Moment of Truth (2007 First round playoffs) – After winning 67 games and stampeding through the league, Dirk ALLOWS his team to lose to a Golden state team that only qualified for the playoffs in the last week of the season. He makes only 2 shots in the final game. 0 for 2 in his quest for a ring.
Can you imagine MJ’s bulls losing round one after their 72 -10 season in the mid 90's?
I like Dirk’s game but his "Moment of Truth" moments cannot be ignored.
In an era with no supreme player like MJ, Bird, Moses, Kareem or Magic, Dirk had his chance last year to put a Greatness stamp on an already impressive career. What did he do? Allowed his team to get swept in the last 4 games of the 2006 NBA championship! Infancy.
This year, I expected Dallas to at least be in the finals as they had one of the best regular seasons in modern times. What did he contribute? Not much and made hollow remarks about being frustrated or disappointed! Infancy.
How about this remark Dirk? “I let my team down and played horribly this year and last year and I take total responsibility for it”. Next year, I guarantee that we will win the championship.”
Even if one has only a single "Moment of Truth" moment in a career, one must seize it. Dwayne Wade has had only one so far, but he annihilated it like a man on fire last year in the NBA finals. That is what CLUTCH players do.
To be fair there are many Dirks out there (past and present NBA) including Pat Ewing, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, Jason Kidd, Allen Iverson and John Stockton just to name a few. They get a little more leeway since most faltered in the MJ era but they still had chances to perform and WIN in their "Moment of Truth". They didn’t and will forever be ringless. Iverson and Kidd will never win an NBA title unless they sign on with a Tim Duncan type team when they are over the hill and hanging around only for a ring.
Dirk is an infant now but he is fortunate in that he has time to DELIVER unlike the mailman Karl Malone. He has time to make his mark and BARK loudly unlike Sir Charles Barkley. He can even GLIDE into greatness unlike Clyde “The Glide” Drexler.
Will he?
He should being surrounded by a strong owner with a winning organization. Mark Cuban has done a wonderful job taking that team from nothing and making it work superbly. Maybe Mark needs to loan Dirk some of the fire and energy that has made him successful in technology and sports.
Dirk has talent around him.
Dirk has a good coach.
Dirk is tremendously talented.
The GREAT players perform when it matters most. Dirk has had relatively easy “Moment of Truth” moments thus far and failed miserably. The road never gets easier.
Maybe he should watch and learn from the Accenture advertisement with Tiger Woods.
It says simply “Go ahead, Be a Tiger”.
Gswede
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Life after Sports
The coach below is a breath of fresh air for the young men at the University of Miami. I hope that he will able to stick to his guns in the WIN,WIN,WIN attitude of college football.
One of my mentors says this to youth all the time:
"What about life after sports"
That question is and should be the most important.
Gswede
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 04, 2007
Coaching Players For Life
By George Will
MIAMI -- Occasionally -- very occasionally -- a football person says something that punctures the fog of George Patton-style rhetoric that football people emit. Before a Super Bowl in the 1970s (the MCMLXXs, for those of you in a Super Bowl frame of mind), Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas asked a subversive question about the game: "If it's the ultimate, how come they're playing it again next year?"
But most football people, and especially football coaches, are of the "Football Is Not a Matter of Life and Death -- It's More Important Than That" school of thought. However, when Randy Shannon, recently named head coach of the University of Miami Hurricanes, says that football can be a matter of life and death, that is not hyperbole, it is autobiography.
Shannon, 40, grew up in Miami's Liberty City, which is what sociologists and other refined thinkers call a challenging urban environment. Shannon was 3 when his father was murdered by one of his friends. "They had an argument," Shannon says matter-of-factly. Two of Shannon's brothers and a sister died, from cocaine and AIDS. By age 16, Shannon was a father. He could easily have been on a path to a prison or a cemetery. Instead, because of football, he went to the University of Miami and became the first member of his family to earn a college degree.
After a brief NFL career with the Cowboys, he went into coaching, and now he is hopscotching around the country recruiting high school seniors, many of whom think college football is a certain path to the NFL. "That," says Shannon, "is the mentality that has to change." Fewer than 2 percent of even Division I college football players will have NFL careers, and most of those who do will be out of the game by the time they are 30 -- the average NFL career lasts less than four years.
The Post's Amy Shipley reports that the University of Miami has more players -- 42 -- on NFL rosters than any other school. Miami's main rival -- the Florida State Seminoles (a T-shirt favored by Miami students reads: "I think, therefore I am not a 'Nole") -- is second with 41. The University of Florida ranks seventh with 35. But in the past 10 years, those three teams have had, combined, more than 1,000 players, all of them exceptional athletes but most of them not of NFL caliber. Which is why Shannon says that when visiting the home of a potential recruit, "I talk to the parents about everything but football."
On a recent day, Shannon was in the Palm Beach area recruiting a wide receiver and then was off to Omaha to make sure that a very large lineman was still eager to be a Hurricane.
Because South Florida is the incubator of so much high school talent (skill positions, Shannon says; for linemen, look to the Midwest, hence the Nebraska trip), during the off-season many NFL players come home to train at the University of Miami's facilities. Shannon says his players "see the fancy cars, the gold chains," so as he takes over Miami's football program, he plans to "come in with a stern attitude."
Stern adults got Shannon to the peak of his profession at age 40. A fourth-grade teacher told him, "You're very smart -- don't let anyone tell you different." A fifth-grade teacher, disapproving his choice of clothes one day, said, "Don't ever come to school like that again." When he was in junior high school, his football coach took the team to play a team in a juvenile detention center, a sobering experience.
Shannon's rules for his players include: If you miss a class, you don't start the next game. Fall below a certain grade-point average, you can't set foot off campus. A conservatively dressed man, with the elegant hands of a surgeon or pianist, Shannon wants his players to learn "how to respect life," so when "they leave the university and the football program, they will go with confidence." They will go, all of them, having taken a public speaking course.
Duffy Daugherty, who coached Michigan State from 1954 through 1972, was an aphorist ("Football is not a contact sport, it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.") and a realist. Because of alumni demands for football perfection, Daugherty said: "A football coach's main problem is that he is responsible to irresponsible people." Shannon, who like 80 percent of his players is African American, feels responsible to, and for, them.
One of my mentors says this to youth all the time:
"What about life after sports"
That question is and should be the most important.
Gswede
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 04, 2007
Coaching Players For Life
By George Will
MIAMI -- Occasionally -- very occasionally -- a football person says something that punctures the fog of George Patton-style rhetoric that football people emit. Before a Super Bowl in the 1970s (the MCMLXXs, for those of you in a Super Bowl frame of mind), Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas asked a subversive question about the game: "If it's the ultimate, how come they're playing it again next year?"
But most football people, and especially football coaches, are of the "Football Is Not a Matter of Life and Death -- It's More Important Than That" school of thought. However, when Randy Shannon, recently named head coach of the University of Miami Hurricanes, says that football can be a matter of life and death, that is not hyperbole, it is autobiography.
Shannon, 40, grew up in Miami's Liberty City, which is what sociologists and other refined thinkers call a challenging urban environment. Shannon was 3 when his father was murdered by one of his friends. "They had an argument," Shannon says matter-of-factly. Two of Shannon's brothers and a sister died, from cocaine and AIDS. By age 16, Shannon was a father. He could easily have been on a path to a prison or a cemetery. Instead, because of football, he went to the University of Miami and became the first member of his family to earn a college degree.
After a brief NFL career with the Cowboys, he went into coaching, and now he is hopscotching around the country recruiting high school seniors, many of whom think college football is a certain path to the NFL. "That," says Shannon, "is the mentality that has to change." Fewer than 2 percent of even Division I college football players will have NFL careers, and most of those who do will be out of the game by the time they are 30 -- the average NFL career lasts less than four years.
The Post's Amy Shipley reports that the University of Miami has more players -- 42 -- on NFL rosters than any other school. Miami's main rival -- the Florida State Seminoles (a T-shirt favored by Miami students reads: "I think, therefore I am not a 'Nole") -- is second with 41. The University of Florida ranks seventh with 35. But in the past 10 years, those three teams have had, combined, more than 1,000 players, all of them exceptional athletes but most of them not of NFL caliber. Which is why Shannon says that when visiting the home of a potential recruit, "I talk to the parents about everything but football."
On a recent day, Shannon was in the Palm Beach area recruiting a wide receiver and then was off to Omaha to make sure that a very large lineman was still eager to be a Hurricane.
Because South Florida is the incubator of so much high school talent (skill positions, Shannon says; for linemen, look to the Midwest, hence the Nebraska trip), during the off-season many NFL players come home to train at the University of Miami's facilities. Shannon says his players "see the fancy cars, the gold chains," so as he takes over Miami's football program, he plans to "come in with a stern attitude."
Stern adults got Shannon to the peak of his profession at age 40. A fourth-grade teacher told him, "You're very smart -- don't let anyone tell you different." A fifth-grade teacher, disapproving his choice of clothes one day, said, "Don't ever come to school like that again." When he was in junior high school, his football coach took the team to play a team in a juvenile detention center, a sobering experience.
Shannon's rules for his players include: If you miss a class, you don't start the next game. Fall below a certain grade-point average, you can't set foot off campus. A conservatively dressed man, with the elegant hands of a surgeon or pianist, Shannon wants his players to learn "how to respect life," so when "they leave the university and the football program, they will go with confidence." They will go, all of them, having taken a public speaking course.
Duffy Daugherty, who coached Michigan State from 1954 through 1972, was an aphorist ("Football is not a contact sport, it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.") and a realist. Because of alumni demands for football perfection, Daugherty said: "A football coach's main problem is that he is responsible to irresponsible people." Shannon, who like 80 percent of his players is African American, feels responsible to, and for, them.
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