Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It’s been 30 years since Michael Jordan had a brief affair with professional baseball. The NBA legend made it to the AAA level with the Birmingham Barons, an affiliate of the Chicago White Sox.
His batting average was .202. He hit 17 doubles, three home runs, and stole 30 bases. He retired at the end of the season after fulfilling a childhood dream of playing big league baseball.
The 6-6 outfielder didn’t light up the scoreboard or post blazing statistics, something baseball is renowned for, but he did make it to AAA.
I’ve heard many Monday morning quarterbacks, and couch potatoes say he wasn’t that good. To that I can ask, “Have you ever seen a AAA baseball game?”
These guys are a phone call away from the Major League and as talented a group of athletes as you’ll find anywhere.
Add in Jordan’s PGA-level play as a golfer and you have a natural athlete that could do anything. He would have been a fabulous hurdler, triple jumper, and middle-distance runner, and likely be in Canton if he’d chosen football instead of basketball. Imagine a 5-9 corner trying to cover MJ on a drive pattern.
These thoughts come to mind as the Olympics unfold in all their glory.
Every four years the sports networks dust off color men and women for swimming, diving, and gymnastics. They’re popular every election year, at least for a while.
Why do we need color analysts to tell us how an event is scored?
Every couch commander in America can tell you the guy didn’t plant his landing so he won’t make the finals. They can all watch the red line marking the world record scrolling ahead of the swimmer and tell you she didn’t make it.
That telltale splash as the diver enters the pool. Nope, too much, they’ll deduct points for that.
What they miss is the incredible athleticism, and the even more amazing work it takes to get to this level.
The detractors just don’t know. They don’t know the level of work it takes to win a state title at their local high school, much less one reached on the world stage. But they can tell you their opinion and try to express themselves as “experts.” It is laughable.
As a guy who has been around athletics his entire life, I appreciate work more than talent.
As the legendary John Wooden of UCLA, the greatest basketball coach of all time said, “Talent is God given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be grateful. Conceit is self-given; be
careful.”
Those are powerful words, but the Wizard of Westwood was much more pragmatic when it came to recruiting players and winning games.
“The key to winning is to have better talent,” he once said in an interview.
Talent is intangible. It is everywhere, and sadly, largely untapped.
My late friend and coach Harold Bailey said this often, “Nothing is more common than untapped high school talent.”
He was correct. How many times have track coaches said, “We have a state championship team walking the halls.”
That talent must reach the track, or it will never be focused into something productive. That requires work, and the two don’t always go hand in hand.
That goes back to the idle spectators critiquing the efforts of men and women who have dedicated their lives to a single athletic event. Words like loser and choke roll too easily out of the mouths of those who have never stepped into the spotlight of competition. It’s always that way.
One of my favorite stories of bad fan behavior came in Kansas City back in 1886. The Kansas City Antelopes were the first professional baseball team in the city. They played on a field with no shade, no scoreboard, and just rough-cut wooden bleachers, but they sold hundreds of gallons of beer at each game.
Fights became common, so common they were like brawls in a hockey game, only these extended into the stands.
Antelope owner, T.S. Twitchell, an attorney who started the Cincinnati Reds three years later, called on one of the team’s biggest fans to work behind the plate as an umpire.
Wild Bill Hickock was a mainstay at the ballpark. When he wasn’t gambling in local saloons he was watching the Antelopes.
Twitchell hired him, six guns and all, to umpire. The fighting stopped immediately. Hickock didn’t have much talent as a baseball player, but he had tremendous talent with his twin 1851 .36 caliber Navy Colt revolvers. Talent is where you find it.
Wooden might not have agreed with every call Hickok made, but he would have respected his talent.
The great coach appreciated talent. He exploited it with Jabbar and Walton, and his success reflected his assessment of it.
“I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience, than a lot of experience and a little talent,” Wooden once said in an interview.
Which brings us back to the Olympics. These people are talented, all of them are. The last place finisher in the women’s 100-meter hurdles is an incredible athlete, she’s just not quite as good as the woman who takes the gold.
It’s the competition that makes the talent. Winning at a lower level is just a stairstep to greater success when mixed with a solid work ethic. All these Olympic athletes arrive with both.
High school track coaches are the last people to deal with simple talent that doesn’t want to work. You find it in sprinters all the time. The kids running the 100 and 200-meter dashes and competing in the long jump are the laziest ones on the team. The middle, and long distance runners, and especially the hurdlers are the hardest working. That’s just the nature of the beast in prep athletics. At the next level, that all changes.
Here is a final quote on talent, from an anonymous source.
“If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men will ever know.”
Though it’s gender specific in the quote, it’s true for both boys and girls, and men and women as well.
Enjoy the Olympics, and have patience with those who profess to master the event by watching the landing or the splash and giving their unsolicited opinion of it.