Leadership: Why we keep watching sport?

Last Sunday's NBA All-Star Game was the lead-in for CNN's sports
writer, Bob Greene's, commentary on "Why We Watch Games." While the
players ' faces gave evidence of committed athletes, Greene described
the event as more of a "class reunion of basketball's elite." So in
that difference between committed athlete and "class reunion"
environment, he asks the question: "what is the real reason we keep
on watching (the games)?"

The answer, he suggests, may be found in a sentence that Pulitzer
Prize-winning writer, John Updike, wrote in an essay, "Hub Fans Bid
Kid Adieu." The essay was inspired by Updike's attendance at the last
game Ted Williams, legendary baseball hero and Hall of Famer, played
in Fenway Park in 1960. The sentence Greene says "explains everything
-- not just about sports, but about the lives the rest of us can
lead."

"'For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot
August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is
the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done
ill.'

Greene writes of this:

"There it is, right there. That tissue-thin difference -- when you
don't necessarily know anyone is watching -- there is the answer. We
all face the choice in our lives every day: to make the extra effort
or not, to stay at the desk for the extra fifteen minutes or to go
home, to revise the project one more time before handing it in or to
settle for something acceptable, if not quite excellent.


"On fields of play -- baseball diamonds, football fields, a basketball
court like the one on which Sunday's All-Star Game will be held -- the
tissue-thin difference is there for the world to see. The lights are
dazzlingly bright; the television cameras carry the close-ups around
the globe. If a player is dogging it, we can tell; if a player is
jogging instead of sprinting, it's self-evident; if a player's mind is
already at the party that will be held after the final buzzer, we
know. Yet once in a while -- we can see it in a player's eyes -- we
are rewarded. Once in a while, sometimes when we are least expecting
to witness it, it's there: a tiny move, an all-but-imperceptible
lunge, an additional thrust, a reach beyond that which should by all
reason be reachable.


"A thing done well, when the player could have gotten away with a
thing done ill. Are the rest of us the same as the players on the
court? In most ways, no. We lack their athletic skill, their physical
grace, their monetary riches. They hear cheers every working night; we
toil in silence. And yet, the one way in which we can be the same, or
at least strive to, is in that pursuit of the tissue-thin difference.
The thing that makes the best of them different is the thing that
offers us, too, the potential to earn that difference -- the effort
beyond mere effort, the desire beyond standard-issue desire, the pride
so strong that it becomes the definition of pride.


"Why do we watch? We watch for those moments. They may be fleeting;
they may come and go so quickly we're not even certain, for an
instant, that we actually saw them. But they're real, and they can be
ours. We wait for them."


On the many fields of life - sports, professional, personal, family,
etc. - everything is visible for the world to see. And we all know
when someone is just going through the actions and not giving their
all. Our personal greatness lies in those countless moments when,
faced with the choice of how we will respond to a situation - in that
brief nanosecond when we choose our response - we must choose wisely
and choose well… "and they can be ours." Let our choices always be in
line with our life's pursuit of excellence - in everything we do and
think. May your week be filled with magnficent choices that show that
your tissue-thin difference distinguishes you far above those who
choose otherwise.