ON December 9, 2004, NBA superstar Tracy McGrady performed a miracle. His Houston Rockets was trailing by 10 at home to the San Antonio Spurs, with 1:09 left on the game clock. The lead seemed to be insurmountable. Fans even started to head to the exits, while a game commentator declared, “Ball game over. All we need here is a final score.”
He was wrong.
The lead was cut down to single digits with under a minute to play before McGrady, also known as T-Mac, began to take over. (If you don’t talk basketball, just skip the next paragraphs and understand that the content of those simply translates to greatness. If you do, great. Let these indelible sequences play in your head once again, play by incredible play.)
With 35 seconds left, the sleepy-eyed, two-time NBA scoring champion drilled a three at the top of the key to make it a four-point game, 71-76. It was a shot that turned out to be the first wave of a historic scoring avalanche. After free throws from the Spurs’ Devin Brown, T-Mac pulled up again from downtown while absorbing contact from a contesting Tim Duncan. He drained the shot and the bonus free throw to complete the four-point play. Rockets now down 75-78 with 24.3 ticks remaining.
Houston then sent Duncan to the foul line to stop the clock again. He sunk two free throws. Spurs lead up to five, 75-80, with only 16.2 seconds to play. Rockets back on offense. They decided to give the ball to T-Mac because he was practically invincible at that point. He canned a tough three-pointer over highly regarded defender Bruce Bowen to make it a single-possession ball game, 78-80, with just 11.2 remaining.
Spurs call time-out. They inbounded the ball to Devin Brown, who lost the ball on a baseline drive. T-Mac was there to pick up the loose ball.
With no time-outs remaining, he went for it, driving hard to the other side and pulling up from rainbow country, over Bowen, over Ginobili and against all odds—swish. Rockets in front, 81-80,
with 1.7 seconds to play. The Spurs inbounded the ball to Tony Parker, who flung a Hail Mary from half-court. He missed, thus, securing the mother of all basketball comebacks.
“I tried to step up and tried to make plays,” McGrady said in his walk-off interview that game. “Shots were falling for me at the end.”
T-Mac has never won an NBA championship throughout his 15-year career. He got inducted this year to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and among his biggest claims to that spot is his late-game performance on that December regular-season game, where he scored a mind-blogging 13 points in a 35-second span.
T-Mac showed what once was conceived as impossible to be attainable. Since then, no basketball game was truly out of hand until the fat lady sang. The trailing team can still come back and win it. Just how McGrady did.
Sports is maligned by some as a realm of clichés and make-believe, nothing more. However, it’s that kind of inspiration which springs from T-Mac’s special display of indomitable spirit that lifts games to more than just games. It’s an empowering success story no different from a businessman beating the odds to rise from rags to riches.
I’ve been a sports fan all my life. For all the years I’ve been following the scores, the players’ stories and the teams’ structures, it’s conclusive that sports mirrors life more than people realize.
Sports is a reflection of life, and if discerned the right way, it’s also a gold mine of life lessons.
T-Mac flashed the value of resiliency. Manny Pacquiao the boxer showed where perseverance could take a person. Michael Jordan, who retired three times in his basketball career, reminded us to never rest on our laurels. Newly minted 2017 New York Marathon winner Shalane Flanagan showed us how to overcome, bucking a nine-month injury recovery process to become the first American woman to win the prestigious race. Billy Miske, a 1920s boxer diagnosed with a fatal kidney disorder, taught us the same lesson of fighting against all odds by stepping in the ring for the last time, despite being too sick to train, just to earn money and buy his children Christmas presents. He miraculously won the fight via a fourth-round knockout. He died less than two months later.
These are the kinds of stories sports produces that go beyond box scores and final outcomes. It’s the intangibles. It’s the human factor. It’s the life lessons that push us past our capabilities to win it a day at a time.