My Basketball Story, Part 2: Hard Lessons Learned, the Hard Way

I came back for tryouts at SOU in the late summer of 2005 with improved quickness, more skill, and in the best shape of my life; I even still had most of my hair (unrelated, but I’m trying to paint a picture here). I thought I had been ready before; now I was REALLY READY. And, after one grand declaration that I could be a college basketball player, 17 months of training, and two tryouts, I was. I made the team and I felt great! For like a week, and then… well, I realized that I had no fucking idea what I was doing. Not that I couldn’t play ball, because I could. I was absolutely good enough talent- and strength-wise to play at that level. I knew how to work hard. Wasn’t that enough? Don’t they always say that a little talent and a lot of hard work will take us anywhere we want to go? Then why all of a sudden did I not feel confident, ready, good enough, secure enough, happy, or optimistic?

There’s not one answer to that question, but rather several answers contained within a theme: I didn’t prepare myself mentally and emotionally for the possibility of success and what happens next. One of the pitfalls of being an early 20-something with a goal is that early 20-somethings don’t really know anything, including how to sustainably work towards a goal. If there are any early 20-somethings reading this, don’t be offended; one of the big truths of life and consciousness is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and can only work with the information that we have at the time. What I mean, though, by “you don’t know anything” is that your brain is still a few years away from full development, and there’s little you can do about it except continue to be alive, try to learn from it, and do your best to steer clear of traumatic brain injury.  Developmentally, I’m talking specifically about your pre-frontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that governs what are called executive functions among other things. 

Executive functions are things like planning, decision-making, short-term memory, and moderating social behavior; what we sometimes think of as “higher function” is also supported by the prefrontal cortex, and this includes things like discernment (good/bad, same/different) and understanding the consequences of an action, thinking outside of oneself, and what’s called “social control,” or the suppression of urges that could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes. It also includes the ability to hold seemingly opposed ideas in the same mental space without totally losing our minds. A not-yet-developed prefrontal cortex is one of the cognitive-developmental mechanisms behind single-mindedness in toddlers and it is behind risky, careless, impulsive, selfish behavior in teenagers. It’s the answer when you (the parent) or your parent (if you’re a teen) asks, “didn’t you think about the consequences before you did X?!” Like, sorry Mom, no, because I literally neurologically cannot do that yet...kids, feel free to use that response. Just be ready for the consequences. Oh wait, you can’t…now you, dear reader, are beginning to see the problem here.

This developmental truth is important in general for those of us who have or work with kids; in the case of the story I’m telling, it matters because as an early 20-something, I didn’t have all the tools to succeed on my own in this endeavor to which I had committed myself. I’m not blaming it all on my brain; there’s so much more that goes into “success,” including how we define it, how we were raised, the environments and relationships and communities and opportunities along the way, and whether we are willing to ask for help on the things that are less easy to talk about. In my case, in the Fall of 2005, I – like anyone – had some things working for me and some against me. And ultimately, my lack of self-awareness and my failure to prepare for success were the difference. After two weeks of practice, I walked into the coach’s office, thanked him for the opportunity, and walked away. What happened?

Planning Ahead

What do I do now that I’ve achieved my goal? I never, not once in all that time that I was working and grinding, stopped to consider what I would do when I made the team, or how I would succeed as a member of the team. I say when, because I never doubted it, even after the first unsuccessful try. Confidence is a funny thing; I had it, perhaps irrationally. The whole time I was working towards my goal, I was clear that I had what it took, and I wasn’t exactly wrong, but I wasn’t exactly right either. As I mentioned early on, I was pretty clueless about what it meant to actually be a member of a college sports team. I had never been recruited, never talked to a student-athlete advisor or any actual student-athletes, hadn’t spent any time around the program. I basically just showed up and expected my talent and work ethic to win the day. And again, it did. But then what? 

The “then what” is an absolute necessity in successful goal achievement. I’m not going to go into a sport psych breakdown of Goal Achievement Theory or motivation; there are plenty of academic papers out there for the academics. What I do want to do is share some things that I’ve learned – through failure, still the best teacher – that are requirements for a sustainable and successful goal orientation. This is not a complete or exhaustive list:

·      Self-awareness: If I can’t look at myself and try to understand my own strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and values, it’s hard to set goals that will hold my attention and dedication when things inevitably get tough. Mindful engagement also allows me to choose productive, useful, and satisfying places to direct my effort and energy, what George Mumford calls “right effort.”

·      Intrinsic motivation/validation: I spent some time early on in this essay talking about the external driving forces behind most sport cultures. Things like trophies, money, accolades, and even wins are all forms of external validation that are dependent on the opinions or value judgements of other people. They are extrinsic motivators, and are notoriously fickle. Intrinsic motivators come from inside of us; they are our “reasons for being” in a space, our self-driven “WHY.” They are what bring deeper meaning and inspiration to the things we choose, to the places we go, and to the activities – like a sport – to which we dedicate our time, effort, energy, intention, and attention. For example, the memories of the moments when we fell in love with our sport are things no one can take away from us, so they tend to be more stable.

·      Preparation for Success: This was a major failure of mine in the basketball saga. I understood what was required to MAKE the team, but I had no concept of what it would require to be ON the team. It’s one thing to train and practice on my own time in the summer; it’s quite another to be a full-time student and full-time athlete, learn an offense and a defense from scratch, try to fit in on an already-established team with an already-established culture. Even 18 years and a lot of life, trauma, experience, and growth away from that day in the Garden, I was in some ways still that sensitive kid trying to fit in. 

And, it’s not just about getting to the goal; a goal is simply something that pulls us forward, sets us on a path, gives us a direction. What happens on the way is unknown; sometimes the point isn’t achieving the goal, but rather being in motion so that we can learn from the journey and so that the next choice can present itself. If we do indeed get to the point where we achieve the goal, there has to be some sort of plan or idea or preparation for what might come next. Like another goal! Which leads to the most important thing:

·      Asking for help: Understanding the resources that I might have had available to me to help me prepare for the next goal – being on the team, succeeding as a student-athlete, playing college basketball, maybe playing professionally somewhere someday, or just simply getting back to loving the sport without needing my ego to be constantly validated – would have made a huge difference. I was used to doing it on my own. Providing my own motivation, being my own driving force. It is clear to me that the ruthless individualism so vaunted in American culture creates a perfect environment for a single-minded drive for external validation. It’s an environment in which we need people on the outside, but only to tell us how great we are – winner! – or how terrible we are (motivation to prove them wrong).

In my case, I could have asked for a playbook to study in that interim year where I was training for the next tryout. I could have sought out an advisor to…well, advise me, on whether it was possible to both major in chemistry and play hoops. I could have talked to the coaches to find out specifically what areas needed improvement. I could have tried to get to know the guys on the team. What other resources did I have available? Who could I enlist to my cause? I never stopped to ask these questions because I didn’t know they were there to be asked. 

·      The Rule of 2/3: This one is for the student-athletes specifically. I wish I had known the “Rule of 2/3,” or “The Rule of 2,” which is that you have to choose two of the three main tenets of your college experience: School, Sport, and Social life. I had a VERY active social life in college. In retrospect, too active. Too many late nights drinking, mostly, also part of my quest to fit in and escape my own anxiety and shyness. Again, I was – underneath the confidence and bravado and not inconsequential basketball talent - insecure and thrived on the validation of others. I hope you’re seeing that this kind of validation doesn’t sustain us; it’s very empty and it goes in its very own bottomless well that will never, ever be full. It never even occurred to me that I could give that up, or that it was even an option. 

·      Diversify Yourself: No one is, of course, just one thing. However, athletes are pushed and conditioned to make their sport and that piece of their identity central and all-important. I bought into it, because like everything there’s good and bad and it felt pretty great to devote myself mind, body, and soul to something. And…at some point the sport leaves us or we leave it. Some of us play for a long time, and others don’t. Even the pros have to hang it up at some point, because in the words of Jalen Rose, “Father Time is undefeated.” So, it’s important to explore who else we are besides the Athlete. This requires honest self-reflection, which of course is hard for people in general and even harder for young people without help. Still, athlete mental health depends on it.

Epilogue

What happened is that after two weeks of practice and weight training sessions and classes, plus trying to maintain some semblance of a social life, I was a week-and-a-half behind in school and my confidence on the basketball court was at an all-time low. I felt lost most of the time, was in a very unfamiliar environment, was all of a sudden afraid to step on the court unless we were just scrimmaging because I didn’t know the offense or defense and didn’t want to feel embarrassed or ashamed because of my shortcomings. I lost sight of what had gotten me there; worse, I stripped it of its meaning. In short, I was anxious and miserable, and clearly unable (in my mind) to be both student and athlete. I was a bit of a mess, and to my limited knowledge and unenlightened perspective, the choice was simple: School or Sport. I thought I was making the best choice for my future, the responsible choice, by quitting the basketball team to focus on academics. I’m not saying it was a bad choice; far from it. In some ways, it helped set me on the path on which I find myself today, one that is very fulfilling and challenging and constantly motivates me to learn more. What I’m saying is that I made that choice with incomplete information because I never bothered to look outside of my own narrow focus as I was working towards my goal, never bothered to have a goal after the first goal, and never cultivated the humility to ask for help. 

Do I regret walking away from the opportunity to play college basketball? I do not. Can I envision what my life might have looked like had I made a different choice? I absolutely can. Plus, this wasn’t the end of my basketball career. What it was, though, was a pivotal moment. I continued to play, and play a lot. I played city league, intramurals, rec leagues, pickup, and when there was no one around, I spent time alone in the gym. You see, the athletic identity is a force nearly as powerful as gravity, and almost as hard to overcome or change. I was still very much a Basketball Player, and now I was also a failure in my own eyes even though it was MY OWN CHOICE. How messed up is that? When I walked away from SOU, my relationship with the game continued to change for the worse. I mentioned that I had a hard time with refs and teammates; this really soured the experience not just for me, but for the people around me. I look back and can say that I was often not fun to play with. 

My ego stayed in the driver’s seat, and my need to prove that I was good enough to play in college and just chose not to (how backwards is that; the ego does amazing acrobatics to protect itself) infused – infected, really – most of the next decade of basketball for me. It showed up in different ways; most often, it was in lost sleep while I tore myself apart for every mistake I’d made, every miss or turnover or failure to get a stop. I had plenty of that for myself – maybe it came from that bottomless, unfillable well of ego validation needs - but I made sure to spread some around to my teammates and the refs. How unpleasant! Or, if you’re being honest, “what an asshole!” I still loved the game, but my increasingly complicated and negative relationship to basketball was actually affecting my mental health and leaking out onto the court. I didn’t see a way out, and didn’t truly want it or even let myself recognize the need.

Ultimately, though I did suffer for the game, I still loved it on some level and got a lot of good out of it. I continued to stay in great shape, made friends, had opportunities for (small) glory. What forced my hand was not the mental or emotional trauma of continuing to play basketball; it was my own physical breakdown. Knees and ankles and hips and backs can only take so much pounding, cutting, twisting, and falling. It got to the point where it took an hour warmup and two days of recovery just to play a few pickup games. I never got to the point where I began to hate or resent the sport, although that is common and tragic; it just got to the point where it wasn’t worth hobbling around for days afterwards. 

So, at 32, I decided to “take a break” to recover (“YOU’RE NOT RETIRING,” screamed my ego). And, after about 3 weeks of no basketball, I noticed something curious: I felt great. Not just physically, although I definitely felt better; I was in less pain and able to devote more time to a balanced training regimen and outdoor adventures. But I’m also talking about an acute, immediate, noticeable improvement in my mental health. I was very tough on myself around basketball, and it was my main thing even as I was working and building a business and coaching other sports. As soon as I went on “sabbatical” – as people often do from something that takes up too much space in their lives – I was sleeping better and not beating myself up as much. It was like a weight had been lifted. My anxiety levels went down (I was also in therapy for this, which helped a lot). And, this was the first time since I walked into that arena at 5 years old and became an Athlete that my athletic identity wasn’t front and center, that my ego wasn’t in the driver’s seat. It was the first time in my life that I had space to reflect on my relationship to my sport and, by extension, to myself; I realized that I didn’t like what I was uncovering, and it both shook and relieved me, and motivated me to dig deeper and learn more. 

This was also the first time that I could really give attention to other possibilities besides being an Athlete. Absent this constant quest for outside validation, what was meaningful to me? And how could I use this experience to set the next goal, find the next path, put all the things I had done and studied and learned and uncovered – and suffered through – to use in service of learning and uncovering and doing more? How could I use all of that to hopefully pay forward the hard-grown fruits of my experience? What was I going to do next? Unlike when I was working to walk on at SOU, I started asking some of the right questions. I started practicing a little more self-awareness, a little more inward reflection, a little more examination of my values, and a little more preparation. I figured out who could help me, and I sought them out and asked for that help. Then I went to school for it, which is part of the story of how I’m here telling this tale today.

Suffice to say that it’s an ongoing process. And, I haven’t touched a basketball in a few years, but it’s not because of the complicated and very mixed relationship I had with the game before. Separation from playing the game didn’t mean that I stopped watching and following it. What I gave up in playing time, I gained back tenfold in appreciation, understanding, observation, and love. Although I’ll always be a Celtics fan, mostly what I appreciate these days is good basketball, played the right way. And, if my body could take it, I would love to get back on the court because although the game remains the same – the same beautiful, complex, awe-inspiring, soul-capturing dance that it has always been - I’ve changed. Learning about sport and learning about myself have put me back in touch with that long-ago, wide-eyed version of me, and he still wants to play ball.

Originally published on October 21, 2021