LAST Saturday I watched at home the movie, “Collateral Beauty” starring Will Smith. The movie is about everything being connected and everyone being connected to one another.
I’ve been a sports columnist for the BusinessMirror for almost three years already and in sports, you can’t help but have connections with athletes and teams you rabidly and passionately root for. Their victories and losses are like being on a rollercoaster on a series of highs and lows.
The movie taught me a lot of life’s lessons and lessons about life. An athlete’s story teaches us that, going up against adversity and tribulation, beating it either at the buzzer or by a decisive margin. The movie also taught me about redemption, you hear that word a lot in sports, athletes suffering career-ending injuries only to resurrect and ascend into the upper echelon of Hall of Fame proportions.
“Time is a current, swim against it or swim with it,” the great ones like Michael Phelps obviously swam with it, pun intended. Michael Jordan was another person who swam with it. Athletes who are persons with disabilities or PWD’s swam with it and they’ve had their share of success and achievement in the Paralympics.
When my De La Salle University Green Archers won four straight University Athletic Association of the Philippines titles from 1998 to 2001, it was nirvana year after year especially every year then presented different challenges.
Every heartbreaking defeat though was a different story and then you tell yourself it is not the end of the world. When the school won in 2007 a year after being unfairly and unjustly suspended, it became the only school in Philippines college basketball history to win a college sports championship a year after being penalized, a redemption which is a major theme in the movie.
“Life is about people” was a line in the movie, people who’ve made a difference in your life. Who are the people who’ve made a difference in your life? Athletes and teams have made a difference in my life, both in wins and losses. I’m pretty sure they’ve made a difference in yours as well. When the Chicago Bulls won six champions in eight years (should’ve been eight-in-eight had Jordan not retired) it made a difference in my life as a Bulls fan then.
When Tom Brady and the New England Patriots made a comeback for the ages in Super Bowl LI, coming back from 25 points down to beat the Atlanta Falcons, it made an impact on me because it was an impossible made possible, a possibility. The feat was inspiring and so was the movie.
There are coaches in both college and professional sports who are excellent motivators, their words will want to make you break through a wall for them. Great motivators like Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski of the Duke Blue Devils men’s basketball squad and Coach John Calipari of the University of Kentucky Wildcats.
When the UCLA Bruins gave a tribute to their late coach, John Wooden, one of the greatest college coaching geniuses of all time, it was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (the greatest UCLA Bruin in my opinion) who assisted him because Wooden was already old and was having difficulty walking. Up to the day of Wooden’s passing, the two men had a lifelong friendship like a father and a son, teacher and pupil, mentor and student.
