REFLECTION
I was my son Benny’s age in 1993, when the Pacers and Knicks squared off in the postseason for the first of six times over a nine-year period. The rivalry that developed through their playoff series was a defining element of my basketball-related memories from high school all the way through college. Needless to say, I was pumped for Game 1 before it even tipped off, and it didn’t disappoint.
The lead went back and forth early on. Everyone was hitting shots, playing defense, and pulling boards. The Knicks eventually got the upperhand by the end of the third quarter, but the largest lead they could muster was eight points, and every time the Pacers would claw back to make it a one or two possession game. But then, early in the fourth quarter, the Knicks went on a 14-0 run and the game started to feel like it was slipping away from the Pacers.
At the 3:44 mark, Jalen Brunson hit the first of two free throws to make it 116-102 and the Knicks called a timeout. Their win probability at that moment was 99.5%. Watching the Pacers head over to their bench as TNT cut to commercial, all I was thinking was “Are the Pacers gonna fight, or are they gonna quit…”
The next 3:44 was a masterclass in determination, perseverance, and the will to win.
LESSON
There’s a photo of me from Super Bowl 51 that has become pretty famous. It’s from early in the 3rd quarter. The Falcons have just scored to go up 28-3. We’re preparing to get the ball back, and I’m sitting on the bench with my hands folded, my head down, staring at the ground.
People ask me all the time: what were you thinking about in that moment? Let me tell you what I wasn’t thinking about: winning.
Don’t kid yourself. When you’re getting your ass whooped late in a game, you’re not thinking about winning. Or at least you shouldn’t be. What you should be thinking about—what was definitely going through my mind—was fighting til the end…
It’s a piece of what I’ve been referring to lately as the NOBULL mentality, but I’ve been using it long before it had a name. On that night, my job was to fight like a Spartan warrior. For the Spartans, success was not necessarily defined by victory on the battlefield, but whether you fought with honor, and if you did lose, that you “went out on your shield."
They did not fear loss or death, because losing in a fight is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Quitting is.
Losing is a part of sports. It’s a part of life. We all lose. Steph Curry loses. I lost a lot. Geno Auriemma, the winningest coach of all time, has lost 165 times. Losing sucks, but at least you can learn from it. The lessons I took from my losses had a real impact on my career and my life, because they gave me a better perspective on winning and taught me to appreciate each win more. Wins are hard to come by.
Quitting, on the other hand, is easy and it only teaches you one thing: how to quit more often. What I mean is, quitting can become a habit. And that is a bad habit to develop, because you’re sacrificing potential long-term gains for short-term relief from pain and struggle. It’s a tradeoff you trick yourself into by telling yourself that you don’t care anymore about the outcome, and therefore both losing and quitting aren’t going to hurt as much. Quitting is the gateway to apathy. And it’s very inviting, because it’s always easier to care less.
You might feel free and unburdened for a while when you quit…but that’s not really what’s happening. Every time you quit or give up or give in, it becomes more and more of your character. After long enough, quitting becomes a value, and that is the last thing you want to happen because quitting is a quick fix that comes with a debt that you will have to pay at some point in the future…with interest.
APPLICATION
Whether we’re talking about sports, or business, or just life, it’s important to understand that things can go wrong for long periods of time before they start to go right. But they won’t ever go right on their own; certainly not if you care less. You are responsible for making positive things happen.
It starts with committing to the fight. Saying, “I’m not going to get fucking embarrassed here,” and meaning it. It requires more commitment, more energy, more determination—never less. It requires you to understand that the value of fighting is not just in the outcome. If you’re down by the equivalent of 28-3, you’re most likely going to lose. In fact, 99% of the time you’re going to lose. But the value in fighting to the end is in the character you build and the lessons you learn from the fight itself.
The most important thing you can learn, that you can apply to any area of life, is to know what it looks like to give 100% and see the tide turn. It looks like positive energy and enthusiasm. When something good happens on the back of those good vibes, no matter how small it is, it starts to create a little bit of hope that elevates the people around you. When that hope gets rewarded in the form of other little wins, it turns into belief that spreads throughout the team, the business unit, the organization, whatever it is that you’re a part of. And that belief is, no matter what the circumstances are, we have the power to turn any defeat, big or small, into something positive.
There’s a word for this: momentum. In a comeback, you’re trying to turn little wins into a snowball that begins to move under its own weight, so that the momentum it creates overwhelms and crushes your opponent, no matter how well they’re doing.
This is the thing that people don’t appreciate about Super Bowl 51, and I suspect that people will forget about Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals. Both the Falcons and the Knicks played well during the comebacks that ended in their defeat. When we got the ball with 8:31 on the clock in the 3rd quarter, Matt Ryan had a perfect passer rating. From that moment onward, he only had three incompletions…it was just that our defense got to him for three sacks and a fumble. The Knicks played equally well. They shot 51% for the game and 50% from the point they took that timeout with 3:44 to go…it was just that Aaron Nesmith was unconscious from behind the arc and Tyrese Haliburton pulled out his clutch end-of-game routine again.
The point is, making a comeback is an intensely personal endeavor: The opponent is irrelevant. The outcome is irrelevant. A comeback has nothing to do with anything but your willingness to fight and your refusal to quit. But you don’t have to take it from me, just listen to the GOAT of GOATs, Michael Jordan, who once said he “never lost a game, I just ran out of time.”
