When I was a youngster, one of the films I used to watch every year around this time was "Pride of the Yankees" the Lou Gehrig story. It was like an annual event. I came to admire not only Gehrig's ability as a player, but his decency as a man, and the strength he had to persevere on his way to 2,130 consecutive games played (I couldn't tell you how many Cal ended up with). Finally, you had to admire the courage, strength and dignity he displayed in dealing with the tragic illness that cut his life too short. The tragedy that I felt was that it seemed unfair to me that this great man's life was cut short by this random act of illness. There's no way you could ever reconcile this in your mind.
His great speech at Yankee Stadium on Lou Gehrig day, when he knew what the illness had done to him and would do him still, forever immortalized the words "today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth". You just can't know the story and watch the film and not be touched deeply.
In some regards, I feel the same way when ESPN does it's annual V-Foundation drive to raise funds for cancer research. It's an annual event, run around this time every year, coincidentally the same time "Pride of the Yankees" would run, and I feel the same way about the great Jimmy V. ESPY speech in 1993.
JIMMY V. 1993 ESPY SPEECH:
He says at the beginning of the speech:
To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number 1 is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number 2 is think. You should spend some time in thought. And Number 3 is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."
Not a bad philosophy to live by. Alone this would have made the speech very good. But then Jimmy V. proceeds to take everyone on an emotional roller coaster within the speech by making us laugh, when he told the story of his first speech, the infamous Green Bay Packer speech. He made us think, when he told us about the fight he wanted to lead against cancer with the formation of his foundation, The V-Foundation, whose motto is the phrase most associated with Jimmy V. "Don't give up, don't ever give up."
And finally he made us cry by ending his speech with this blast:
"Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever. I thank you and God bless you all."
Jim Valvano would die two months after giving this speech, just as Gehrig died shortly after delivering his most famous speech. The last couple of years, I find the comparisons between the two both sad and poignant, but in the same sense that Gehrig's story was inspiring to me, I find Jim Valvano's story doing much the same thing. The strength he displayed to be thinking of others when he knew what this dreaded disease had done to him and would do, to chose be a source of hope and strength and inspiration rather pity is awesome. His brother Bob wrote that he asked Jim why he was willing to work so hard when he was so sick himself and he said "This is my life. When you get sick, you can choose to live or wait to die. I choose to live."
Jim was a great coach, a great motivator, with a great passion for sports and life and how they seem to fit together. His North Carolina State Wolfpack's remarkable run through the ACC Tournament, the NCAA's and finally a Houston Cougar Phi-Slamm-Jamma team, that seemed more like it was heading to a coronation than a Finals appearance,ranks as one of the more remarkable coaching jobs of all-time. They were huge, huge underdogs. Maybe only the second biggest underdogs I've seen win, trailing only the 1980 Miracle on Ice Team. And yet they won, and afterwards you felt foolish for doubting them.
Fortunately for Jimmy V., his legacy lives on through his foundation. And the great memories.
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