Its Never Too Late to Learn and Set an Example

First of all it's nice to know another Filipino who rips off Yahoo Sports for material that is useful to prove a point beyond sports. Second of all it makes my day when someone tells me they learn something from reading my stuff. You never stop learning. I also learn more, the more I spread whatever little knowledge I acquire. Again, a concept by Steven Covey.

Watching and learning is powerful. All the cliches apply. Do as I do. Ears are closed to advice but eyes are open to example. When I finally go through the final hoop of my Oral Comprehensive Exam for De La Salle Graduate School of Business maybe I will thank Joe Dumars. Then I will be an example.

Ed

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20081022-167729/Inspiring

Theres The Rub
Inspiring

By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:27:00 10/22/2008

Joe Dumars is a well-known and beloved figure in the NBA. He recently accomplished his greatest feat yet, and it had nothing to do with basketball.

Dumars was one-half of the formidable Pistons backcourt of the late 1980s, with the other half consisting of Isiah Thomas. Thomas went into free fall after his playing days, making a mess of the New York basketball organization for several years before being booted out of there this year. Dumars went on to become one of the model executives not just of basketball but of the corporate world generally, turning Detroit’s front office into the envy of peers. As president of the Motor City franchise, he piloted Detroit to the championship in 2004 without going into a kind of lavish spending and high-profile player-swapping the rest of the league was forced to.

But, like I said, his recent and greatest feat had nothing to do with basketball. Adrian Wojnarowski, a Yahoo sports writer, wrote about it some days ago. Dumars was born to parents who had the intellectual mettle to make it through college but never had the opportunity to do so. His mom was a custodian of Northwestern State University in Louisiana while his dad was a truck driver. Joe left McNeese State University in Central Michigan with several years of college behind him, but needed 21 units more to graduate. He always planned to finish it, but never found the time to do so.

Over the years, the trophies and the medals and the awards piled up, but he always felt something lacking inside. “It gnawed at me,” Dumars said. “It just gnawed. I’m always talking to my players and my organization about, ‘No excuses.’ You play 14 years, and become a president of a team and you just haven’t had the time—or rather, you didn’t make any time—to get it done.”

Dumars’ wife, Debbie, has a master’s degree in Education, and their son, Jordan, and daughter, Aren, are both in school. Jordan is on his way to the University of South Florida on a basketball scholarship. Joe decided to find the time to get it done. Some 18 months ago, he called up his school to enroll in the online course to complete his bachelor of science in business management.

Wojnarowski: “For all the family discussions of balancing academics and athletics, Debbie understood that nothing made more of a profound impact than her son coming home to find his father completing his course work in his study late at night. ‘If you’re going to talk about falling through in life, you’ve got to show it,’ she said. ‘That’s why it was important for Joe to get his degree, and say, ‘Hey, look what I did.’ It kept in line with everything he was preaching.’

“In August, the McNeese State president arranged a private graduation ceremony at his house on campus. With the playoffs, Dumars had to miss the June commencement. So, Dumars invited some 15 family and friends in Lake Charles, and told his daughter, Aren, and Jordan that they had to come, too….

“The most famous alumnus in the history of McNeese State University wore his cap and gown and his wife wasn’t sure that she had ever seen anything—not the NBA titles, not the Hall of Fame, nothing—that left him seeming so … so … satisfied.”

It’s almost enough to make me shift my loyalties to Detroit. It’s an affirmation of some pretty good values. Not the least of them is the power of example.

It’s not what you say but what you do that imparts lifelong lessons. You can lecture your kids about the importance of learning and education, but if you spend your Sundays in the cockpit and stagger home late at night stinking of gin, there’s precious little love of learning you’ll encourage. That ad that says that in the eyes of your child, what you do takes on an entire syllabus, or something to that effect, is absolutely true. You bribe a cop, you drive through a red light, you cut corners, you will have taught your child a lesson not all the pointers on good manners and right conduct at school can undo.

Conversely, you see your parent trying to better himself or herself, that’s something you’ll carry with you all your life. Don’t you just get goose pimples imagining how Dumars’ kid must have felt seeing him burning the midnight candle in his study deep into the night?

Just as well, it affirms something truly valuable that’s being lost today. That’s being lost today because of things like, well, basketball and American Idol, with all the glitter and hoopla and big bucks that they promise and exude. And which have become today’s measure of success.

By those standards, Joe Dumars would have been one of the most successful men in the world. He had fame, he had wealth, and he had power—more than most men on Earth could possibly have in 10 lifetimes. He had the admiration of his peers. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had shown himself to possess as much brain as brawn, every inch deserving of his executive position. Hell, his management style was being copied by people who had more letters after their names than in them.

Yet he wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t define success as the way other people saw him or measured him or proclaimed him to be, he defined success as the way he saw and weighed himself. He defined success as fulfilling a longing, an ache, a desire to be better than he was, to be the best that he could be. He had done that in the sport he loved, he would do it in the life he lived.

Some sportsmen accomplish things that go way beyond sports. Muhammad Ali did—Joe Frazier never could grasp why Ali stood head and shoulders above the other fighters of his time and other times. On a quieter note, which is always how Dumars has done things, Dumars has produced an echo of it. There were only 15 people who attended his graduation.

But a lot more watched—and learned.