I’ve lately been wondering why I’ve always loved sports, not just playing them but also watching them. I’m not terribly enamored of professional or college sports industries, but I truly love watching the action.  Still I wonder why I, as a grown man, continue to enjoy watching boys and girls, young men and young women, play a game.  I used to assume it was because sports were one of the few places in the world where the winner was always apparent (college football being the notable exception) and where the "better man" on any given day prevailed.  I thought it was the last place in our complicated society where the simplicity of winning, the triumph of hard work combined with amazing talent, was displayed.  How naive.

Now I’m coming to believe that sports are a never ending parable.  My favorite recurring theme is that of the promising young talent who never comes to realize his potential, and of course his polar opposite in the grinder who has a base level of talent but works his ass off to realize his full potential. In the NBA the former gets the shoe contract at 22 and is out of the league at 28, and the latter plays for 10 years, never gets the shoe contract and is beloved by his teammates.  But as with many parables this is an oversimplification.

Take the example of Allen "The Answer" Iverson.  He’s a remarkable talent, a scoring machine and a fearless competitor on the court.  He’s also a malcontent, an inefficient shooter and a ball hog.  I’d argue that the only reason he scores 30+ points a game is that he takes an unbelievable number of shots, and that if he truly wanted to reach his full potential he’d learn how to be a point guard who leads the league in assists while averaging 20 points a game.  He’s just too quick and too good a ball handler not to be a great point guard, but instead he puts on a one-on-one clinic every night, hoists 25 shots a game and leads the league in points scored and teammates-as-spectators.

Now Iverson is playing for the Denver Nuggets after wearing out his welcome in Philadelphia.  Denver already has a great scorer in Carmelo Anthony and the sports prognosticators are all wondering if the two of them can share the ball.  Hopefully they can, but the only way it will happen is if Iverson finally reaches his full potential as a basketball player.  He needs to transform himself into a true point guard.  He’s still one of the quickest guys in the league and if he decided to he could put an incredible amount of pressure on any team in the league by breaking down their defense with his dribble and then distributing the ball to his open teammates. 

Thinking about Iverson reminds me of conversations I used to have with my Mom when I was in high school.  School came pretty easily to me and I could bring home an A-B report card without breaking too much of a sweat.  I was a perennial "B Honor Roll" kid and what I got from Mom was, "Should have been an A Honor Roll, and it would have been if you’d studied harder."  That was usually followed by, "Being smart isn’t enough, you also have to work hard."  The rest of my life has been spent figuring out how right she was. You see I might have been considered pretty smart in high school, but in college I was average at best and my lack of a work ethic took its toll the first couple of years.  It was only when I learned to crack the books throughout the semester, not just before mid-terms and finals, that my GPA started going north of 3.0.

Now as a father I have the opportunity to see the "talent/work ethic" mix at play.  All three of my kids are very bright, all have an immense amount of talent, and all have a varying degree of work ethic.  One seems to have been born with a burning desire to achieve at the highest level and has the straight A report cards to prove it.  The other two seem to have been born with immense imaginations that have them living in an alternative universe about 50% of the time.  The only reason they don’t come home with straight C report cards (or worse) is a fear of the parental wrath that would ensue.  Our straight A kid has no more "natural talent" than our other two, unless you consider an innate work ethic as a talent (it might very well be), but because she works harder she accomplishes more than her siblings at this point.

Now some might argue that measuring my kids’ accomplishments by their grades isn’t fair.  After all there’s more to life than grades.  That’s true and again I think Iverson’s story provides a powerful lesson.  If school is the "game" and grades are a form of keeping score then they matter for that very reason.  But as is the case with Iverson,  how you play is as important as how much you score.

Iverson is famous for a press conference he had during a tiff he was having with his coach about practice.  He hated practicing and repeatedly pointed out that he couldn’t believe he was being held accountable for missing practice.  He figured that if he showed up with his "warrior" mentality for each and every game then practice was irrelevant.  This is a pretty common argument among the talented (I’m so good I don’t need to practice), but in basketball practice is the homework.  It’s where you hone and perfect your teamwork and it’s where you prepare for the big "test".  Talent can get you only so far, and without practice you’re going to encounter a situation for which you aren’t prepared and which no amount of talent will overcome.  His coach understood this and rightly insisted that Iverson practice with the rest of his team, and show up on time for that matter. Eventually Iverson’s intransigence became too much for the team and they put him on the shelf until they could find someone willing to take him.

For my kids the lesson here is that while good grades are important, it’s just as important how they go about getting them.  The reason that my daughter is realizing more of her potential than her brothers at this point is because she’s smart and she "practices".  When my sons "practice" they invariably succeed as well as their sister, but they have to be reminded to "practice" much more often than their sister.  If and when they learn that they need to "practice" without being hounded by their parents then they’ll be in great shape.  Until then I’ll ride them like a rented mule, or to keep on message I’ll be their version of Larry Brown.