Recently, this video of Rick Pitino yelling at his St. John’s team during halftime of an early-season road game against Providence went viral:
“You guys keep blowing opportunity upon opportunity upon opportunity. You’re like children with bad things happening. Instead of digging in and being tougher, you wilt. Where is your f***ing toughness?! Where have you guys been raised that you’re so weak mentally that you just f***ing give up when something doesn’t go right for you? Don’t you know what adversity is all about? That’s the f***ing game of life, not the game of basketball. You don’t f***ing get down when things go wrong. You dig in and get tougher. Your whole life’s gonna be adversity, learn how to f***ing deal with it!”
If you’ve played sports long enough, you know what it’s like to get yelled at like this by a coach. I’ve been yelled at by every coach I’ve ever played for.
Like it or not, yelling is part of the fabric of organized team sports. Of course, it can get out of hand and become toxic when a coach is a bully or a sadist (we all know these stories), but this wasn’t the angry Bobby Knight kind of yelling that ends with chairs being thrown. It wasn’t the scary, red-faced yelling you get from passionate guys like Bob Huggins or Frank Martin, either. It wasn’t even the motivational kind of yelling you get pregame from guys like Ray Lewis and Brian Dawkins.
This was a scared-straight, sliding doors, change-your-life-forever type of yelling. This was the type of yelling you hear when someone is desperately trying to reach you. To reach through your heart to get to your brain and break the mental block that’s holding you back.
The reason even the most mild-mannered coaches will find themselves yelling at the top of their lungs from time to time is because, to a good coach, every game matters. Every play matters. Doing things right matters. Trying your best matters. Competing your hardest on every drill and every play, whether it’s in practice or in a game…matters. And not just for how it impacts the team or the scoreboard, but how it impacts players in every other area of life.
People have been calling this video one of the greatest motivational speeches they’ve ever heard. I think every young person needs to hear its message. So does every aspiring athlete, entrepreneur, and artist. But not for its motivational quality.
I don’t actually think motivation was Coach Pitino’s goal in this speech. His guys didn’t need motivation. They worked their butts off to earn their scholarships to St. John’s. You don’t just waltz into a storied Big East program on pure talent. You work your way there—with confidence, self-motivation and an unstoppable drive to win.
Pitino wasn’t trying to will his players to victory, he was trying to teach them how to refuse to lose. He was trying to shift their mindsets and open their eyes to the formative power of adversity and the character-defining nature of perseverance and persistence. He knows as well as anybody that these are the attributes you have to cultivate if you want to find success in life no matter what fate sends your way—whether that’s a Syracuse 2-3 zone, an illness in the family, a personal lapse in judgment, an economic downturn or a thousand other things. That’s what he was trying to get into their heads.
I haven’t talked to him, but I bet one of the things that pissed off Coach Pitino was that his team was playing like they thought they could breeze into the old Dunkin Donuts Center and walk out with a victory, as if the Friars were just going to hand it to them like a dozen crullers, and when that didn’t happen, they started to crumble. The sense of urgency in Pitino’s speech, which came out in the form of yelling and cursing, was a recognition of the fact that they were completely unprepared mentally for what it was going to take to turn the game around, to not lose it.
You can almost feel it, watching Coach Pitino pace the floor in front of his guys and make eye contact with each of them. This wasn’t just a moment for St. John’s as a team to come together and live up to their preseason expectations, it was the moment for each one of those young men to live up to the expectations of the people who have supported them and to exceed the expectations of every single person who has ever doubted them.
Super Bowl 51.
Atlanta 28, New England 3.
3rd quarter, 2:12 to go.
This was a moment for the Falcons to put their boots on our necks, to get over the hump, and to etch their names in the history books for the first time as champions.
It was also the moment for us to show everyone what we were made of and to show the world our true character. Remember, Rob Ninkovich and I were suspended for the first four games of that season. We got a good amount of hate at every road game. And while we put the wood to teams on offense and regularly won games by two scores (at home or away), come playoff time our defense still wasn’t getting the respect it deserved despite giving up the fewest points in the league. Being down 28-3 late in the game gave the doubters and the haters all the ammo they needed to carpet bomb us with a barrage of “I Told You So’s.”
We all know how that game ended.
Still, I don’t think most people understand why it ended the way it did. It ended with a Patriots victory for the same reason St. John’s came back to beat Providence by 2. We refused to lose. The Falcons could have locked up that game at multiple points in the second half, but to do it they were going to have to take the win from us, we weren’t going to give it to them. Our refusal to lose was stronger than their desire to win. This mindset, I believe, was the difference between their first championship and our fifth as a franchise.
As for the Johnnies, they’ve gone 17-2 since Coach Pitino dropped his mind-altering truth bombs on them, losing those two games by a combined 3 points. Now they are #6 in the country, with a chance at a 1-seed in the NCAA Tournament, primed for a deep run.
They just have to dig in, get tough, and f***ing deal with whatever comes their way.
Words to live by.
