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Well, well, well. I finally got to watch future WNBA star Caitlin Clark play a full game of basketball, and though her showing in the final four was not as glossy as some may have expected, it was pretty clear from the gravity she commanded on the court, that she is one special athlete. I won’t get too deep here, but what I saw only solidifies what I had written about at the end of last year. She is quite simply an evolution for the game of basketball, standing on the shoulders of giants, male and female, not least of which is Steph Curry, whose game she has emulated, and in some ways expanded. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.
I was talking to an old friend of mine the other day about Udonis Haslem, and the conversation turned to the dreams we had when we were in our 20s. For those of you who are too young to know (or too burned out to remember) Haslem played his entire career for the Miami Heat, and retired from a glorious 20 seasons in the NBA at the end of last season. He was never a big name, he probably had the most attention in the cultural zeitgeist when he was playing with Lebron on those Miami Heat championship runs in the early 2010’s but stuck around the Heat organization for a long time after those championships because he was a glue guy, an old head who kept the younger players in check, who upheld the culture, and made sure no one was dicking around when they weren’t supposed to. Essentially a locker room guy, player as coach type, who no one, no matter who they were, messed with.
When I was younger, younger than 30, I used to think the only way to succeed was by being the very best, the tip of the pinnacle. The richest. The coolest. The most talented. Anything short of that, a failure.
No teenager dreams to be the next Udonis Haslem.
We want to be Allen Iverson or Steph Curry or Lebron James, or Michael Jordan.
We want all the minutes. All the points. All the swishes. All the dunks. All the girls.
When I was young the very idea of being anything less than the number one best who ever lived was inconceivable, and I looked at people who were older than me, adults in the “real world,” or basketball players, who didn’t achieve that level of success, as failures.
Don’t judge me. I’m just a product of my environment. 🏊
Perhaps Udonis Haslem was fine being a non-famous role player on a basketball team, but my destiny was to stand on a stage with multiple MVP trophies and three Oscars in my hand as I thanked my sister for supporting me. It’s funny to think that ideas like that lived somewhere in my reptile brain back then, and though I can’t trace it to one bite, I’m sure it had something to do with a few central elements of my background.
For one my parents and grandparents were Jewish immigrants. They just had that spirit about them, from my dad’s serial entrepreneurism to my grandfather’s, well, serial entrepreneurism. My dad and grandfather were the two central adult male figures in my life, and both had big dreams that worked and didn’t work in various ways, but for sure their gumption, for lack of a better word, was passed down to little old me, from a very early age.
Another piece of my kid-hustle spirit probably came from the kids who I went to school with. I went to a Jewish school and a lot of my friends also happened to be first-generation, with Jewish parents who had emigrated from places like Lithuania, Turkey, Singapore, Iran, and Uruguay. It’s hard to say exactly why but almost all of them grew into becoming businessmen, like their fathers, and to this day they are extremely competitive, and highly motivated to succeed, to varying levels of masochism.
Born near Kim Kardashian is another reason I think I was infected with the bug to be first place, it’s hard not to be when you grow up in a status conscious city like Los Angeles, where things like money and success practically drip like sap off hundred foot palm trees, and get stuck in everything from your jeans to your fro.
And last of all, perhaps more so than any of the reasons above, I was young, and when you’re young, you know how it is, you place yourself at the center of everything, and expect the world to open up to you like a Kardashian late at night, just because you’re you. You don’t have an appreciation for the Rui Hachimura’s of the world, or the Alex Caruso’s, or the Kris Middleton’s, even. You want to be the star, the Guy, the only one anyone ever talks about.
There’s a lot to admire in that kind of gumption. It’s the secret sauce that allowed for a young rapper from Chicago to take the hip hop world by storm, or for a player like Charles Barkley to rip the head off of the NBA when he first came up in the 80s, but it’s also something you kinda need to grow out of otherwise you kinda end up like older Kanye, or Draymond, middle aged dads whose unchecked egos kinda just hurt people’s feelings, versus, say, the emotional maturity of someone like Udonis Haslem, which mentors and teaches and helps others around him bloom.
The wise players check their egos and welcome this change, or at least don’t resist it, and have long careers in the NBA, like Haslem, or Jeff Green, or Jared Vanderbilt. Even the greats like Lebron or Kareem, who actually do make it to the pantheon, eventually learn that lesson. It’s almost certainly why they’re there.
On the other hand, I get the temptation to resist. Some magical Ego Forest where all of your insecurities go away, where your success is so grand that you never doubt yourself, where your self worth is always crisp, and you exist in a reality where no one can hurt you, and you can never hurt.
Something like that would be nice, wouldn’t it?
One day, if you’re lucky enough, you might get the opportunity to face that ego self, and make peace with it, the self standing on the mountain and raising up his hands as he snaps his fingers for rain, expecting the clouds to listen.
Snap, snap, snap.
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U is for Udonis!
I’m going to work ‘Ego Forest’ in to my repertoire. Do not expect attribution