Perhaps We Shouldn't Accept Not Trying
Lessons from Basketball Legends — Namely, Michael Jordan, Geno Auriemma and Red Auerbach
An idea for a Waywards post came to me last night. In truth, several related ideas came to me. They seemed worth sharing sooner rather than later. So strap in.
For my birthday a few days back, I bought myself a couple of books, including the coffee table-friendly text, “I Can’t Accept Not Trying: Michael Jordan on the Pursuit of Excellence,” published back in 1994 and authored by the basketball legend alluded to in the subtitle. Jordan authored the book after he had won three championships with the Chicago Bulls and before he would go on to win three more, cementing his place — at least in my mind — as the greatest to ever grace the hardwood.
Now, the ESPN-Netflix documentary miniseries, The Last Dance (2020), which detailed those epic title runs with the Bulls, brought renewed attention to Jordan’s legacy and engendered criticism of MJ’s attitude. Depictions of people and past events in the show also sparked ire. Some of the flak, like the frustrations expressed by former teammates, likely have merit.
But in the main, the 36 page book by Jordan I bought just before I turned 37 contains none of the issues attributed to the miniseries.
I have no qualms recommending “I Can’t Accept Not Trying” as a holiday present for anyone looking to gift a friend or family member with a short book written in a smart, easily comprehensible style. I imagine the gift might appeal to kids (about 10 and up, I reckon), to teens, or to anyone else. An individual going through tough times, a person in need of nuggets of wisdom applicable to various walks of life, or someone in search of a quickly digestible source of inspiration might especially appreciate what Jordan wrote.
I’ll explain why. Then I’ll take you on a scenic detour to explore personally and socially significant themes in relation to the book and basketball before driving this essay home.
***
On the second page of “I Can’t Accept Not Trying,” Jordan suggests approaching “everything step by step.” Solid advice. It’s easy to overwhelm oneself if you try to focus on all you want to accomplish at once. Tasks become too daunting when you do that.
In addition, “His Airness,” as the immortal number 23 also has also been called, offers useful advice as regards failure and not being so afraid you let fear hold you back.
“If it turns out my best isn’t good enough, then at least I’ll never be able to say I was too afraid to try,” Jordan wrote. “Maybe I just didn’t have it. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. There’s nothing wrong with that and nothing to be afraid of either. Failure always made me try harder next time.”
That all tracks, to my knowledge, save for maybe the notion there’s never anything to fear. For Jordan, maybe that’s true enough. But for others in some contexts, fear emerges as an entirely rational response. It’s self-protective in certain cases; however, overemphasizing self-protection at the expense of personal growth and transformation often limits a person’s potential. It can prevent emergence of the sort of self capable of accomplishing much more, be that individually or cooperatively for and with other persons. Facing fears predicated upon possible outcomes that can be difficult, disastrous and quite worthy of trepidation, in contrast, can sometimes be the only path to improving oneself along with the social relations that in large part constitute what we mean by — and what’s meaningful about — the self. Or so experience seems to indicate.
Jordan alludes to as much. He recommends overcoming unhelpful fears and, when efforts don’t go as planned, finding “fuel in any failure,” especially since the lack of (initial) success “actually just gets you closer to where you want to be.”
Channeling his one-time coach, Phil “Zen Master” Jackson, if implicitly, Jordan contends fear often stems from a lack of focus, noting how he would never have knocked down shots from the free throw line — including, I’ll add, one he netted with his eyes closed 31 years ago — if he thought about all the cameras and the millions of people watching instead of concentrating on putting the ball in the basket.
“I can accept failure,” the GOAT wrote on page 12 before invoking the book’s titular line. “Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
I love that. Sure, we have to sometimes be selective when it comes to what we try and how much time and energy we want to devote to whatever we opt to give a go. The key message, though, in regards to what you know deep down you need to do (failure or rejection be damned), and/or as it pertains to what you truly desire or are passionate about, rings true. We fail if we don’t try, and we need not accept failure to try. We tolerate not trying in critical instances at our own disservice and peril.
That probably applies, if I may, to most any worthwhile goal(s). Consider, if you will, desired accolades in athletics demanding sacrifice even when reward isn’t guaranteed or readily forthcoming. Or you could think about work involving a learning curve required to develop valuable skills. You might contemplate love, romance and erotic life ripe with the possibilities of rejection or ridicule. Perhaps you prefer to ponder the often-challenging arenas of workplace, tenant and community organizing when failure too frequently appears imminent and defeat all but assured given the strength of the structures seeking to thwart those efforts. And when it comes to putting real vulnerabilities aside to put on a performance or so as to share openly in the interest of everyone, failure looms large, but so too does the ineluctable consequence of failing to face fears and demons at odds with the good and the beautiful that could be.
At times, the lesson learned from failure fails to present itself clearly. Opaqueness notwithstanding, failures usually contain the seeds for future success, per Jordan, or produce an aftermath pregnant with possibilities. This might be nothing more than an opportunity to better grasp the circumstances that led to abject disaster. Although failure and strife rarely present the insight on a silver platter, they can reveal ways to better steel yourself against and overcome hardships, individually or via the reconstitution of human relationships as needed.
With respect to the latter, Jordan offers relevant advice in his book. As he observes on page 20, “society tends to glamorize individual levels of success without taking the entire process into account.” The remark about accounting for the larger process reinforces his starting point about going step by step, concentrating on setting and accomplishing small goals in order to ensure success in realizing ones that otherwise appear insurmountable. The comment also highlights the narrow notions of personal acclaim and societal obsession with supposedly self-made success that obscure all the underlying labor and relationships upon which success and the self must always be based.
The 6’6” six-time NBA Finals MVP and 10-time NBA scoring champ also extols the “selfless process,” and laments the common “tendency to ignore or [to] fail to respect all the parts that make the whole thing possible.”
He recalls how the Bulls handled high-pressure situations. They “plugged into one another as a cohesive unit.” That reliance on solidarity strikes me as (socially) significant and seems to me significantly undervalued by a culture that unfortunately fails to adequately cultivate those kinds of bonds.
“There are plenty of teams in every sport that have great players and never win titles,” Jordan continued. “Most of the time, those players aren’t willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the team. The funny thing is, in the end, their unwillingness to sacrifice makes individual goals more difficult to achieve.”
Well put, right?
The 14-time NBA All-Star proceeds to credit what he accomplished to his attention to fundamentals, the “most crucial” facet of his NBA game, and that too seems like an insight applicable across and beyond sports.
Fundamentals, those “basic building blocks or principles that make everything work,” need to be in place before you can craft real beauty, greatness and preferential outcomes.
The hero to millions if not billions of hoops fans around the world mentioned some people seem “so focused on composing a masterpiece that they never master the scales.” One requires the other.
“The minute you get away from fundamentals—whether it’s proper technique, work ethic or mental preparation—the bottom can fall out of your game, your schoolwork, your job, whatever you’re doing,” Jordan cautioned.
Without naming any names, he alludes to guys in the NBA at the time (circa ~1994) who never reached their achievable heights because they lacked the foundation to build upon.
A properly constructed and assiduously refined base layer enables perception of the aforementioned larger, longer process, the esteemed shooting guard suggested.
“When you understand the building blocks, you begin to see how the entire operation works,” Jordan noted, adding that enhanced vision permits you to act with greater intelligence (and thus effectiveness) — a point to which we’ll return toward the end of this essay.
Jordan cites Celtics great Larry Bird as an exemplar. “He essentially mastered the fundamentals to the point that he overcame any physical limitations he might have had,” MJ wrote about “Larry Legend.”
Later on, Jordan explains how he tried to set an example. As acknowledged above, there, admittedly, might’ve been monomaniacal elements to his approach.
Still, there’s something to be said for holding oneself to a higher standard.
“Those around you have to know what to expect,” Jordan wrote on page 33. “They have to be confident that you’ll be there, that your performance will be pretty much the same from game to game, particularly when things get tight.”
The comment can be considered in light of what he wrote about building a cohesive unit earlier in the book. Likewise, reliability usually proves crucial if you’re trying to remedy those cultural deficits having to do with an absence or dearth of community. An authentic community, I’d offer, entails realistic knowledge that you can trust people thanks in no small measure to the fact they can trust you. Becoming reliable, keeping commitments, embodying dependability, following through, and doing what you say you’re going to do — or, at least trying your best to uphold your word whenever possible — constitute preconditions for shared purpose and meaningful social relations.
“Ultimately,” Jordan added, “coaches or players can say anything they want, but if they don’t back it up with performance and hard work, the talking doesn’t mean a thing. That’s why I tried to play through all the little nagging injuries—to make a point, to set a standard.”
***
Geno Auriemma, head coach of the NCAA D1 women’s basketball team at the University of Connecticut (UConn), addressed a similar point when speaking with Brett Ledbetter at a recently recorded event in St. Louis, Missouri, located about an hour or so from the rural Southern Illinois town where I grew up. The discussion provides reason for a worthwhile, apropos detour here.
“You gotta work,” Auriemma said about the message he tries to hammer home to his team, after honestly acknowledging his own shortcomings. He added it’s “not in everybody’s nature to get up every morning and work.”
For that reason, Auriemma told Ledbetter, he doesn’t really give the players he coaches a choice — a Jordanesque sentiment, to be sure.
In response, Ledbetter brings up players who don’t have much of a shot at making it to the highest level, given certain realities.
I don’t like to ever suggest someone can’t do what they put their mind to. But it behooves us to account for real limitations and limiting situations.
Even some of the hardest working athletes won’t realize their dreams, or they’ll have dreams dashed. The competition in the sports world is elite, and as former NBA All-Star, the 5’9” Isaiah Thomas, has candidly explained, the process determining who gets opportunities isn’t always fair or reflective of who could best contribute.
The same holds true for enjoyment and success in our academic and socioeconomic systems. Within those systems, an insidious and oft-repeated faith in the operation and value of meritocracy elides structural barriers. The same faith comes tied to the assumption a stratified system, supposedly determined and justified by ideologically exalted merit, ought to prevail. It not only blinds us to the lie of merit-based success within those major institutions. It also implies that (illusory) merit-based success should structure our lives at the expense of, say, communities not characterized by relations in which some people monopolize the power to give others orders and some are coerced into obeying without getting to influence decisions affecting them.
In the academic context, the not-so-implicit assumption that follows posits that the joy in rewarding, productive and creative scholarly endeavors ought to be meted out (and rewarded) on the basis of competition, which we also usually fail to recognize as rigged in ways that have a human impact.
The competitive spirit that pushes athletes like Jordan and players like those who routinely win titles under Auriemma helps make a sport like basketball a public treasure. But the mythical beliefs detailed before expropriate, debase and defile that spirit.
As a result, living out the values both Jordan and Auriemma invoked can become exceedingly difficult. Moreover, those mythical notions can obfuscate how social positions enable some to exhibit cherished values without the same work others have to put in to do so. They render invisible the obstacles often faced in trying to epitomize celebrated or desirable ethics.
Perhaps that’s why, in his conversation with the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, Ledbetter mentioned the importance of meeting people where they are. Unwilling to disagree, the UConn coach nodded in agreement.
During their dialogue, just prior to the previously recounted exchange, Ledbetter played a clip of three-time All-Star Bradley Beal — whose signature mid-range pullback, I’d be remiss not to note here, is reminiscent of a move Jordan mastered — speaking to teenage hoopers.
"They take your bread, bro,” Beal told the teenagers about the dog-eat-dog world of high-level hoops. He’s right. What Beal described with his “real talk,” as it were, might be justifiable in an elite sports context. But it also occurs outside of athletics.
***
I’ll share personal anecdotes to clarify how that occurs in the higher education world.
I worked as an adjunct professor from 2015 through part of 2021. The work wasn’t always consistent, as colleges and universities plug in precariously employed adjuncts and contingent faculty off the tenure-track when it suits them, leaving instructors without classes and sans income some quarters or semesters. Adjuncts are also usually paid so little they have to teach an excessive number of courses and students at multiple schools simultaneously to survive, as I often did and needed to do to even have a shot at paying rent and bills. The circumstances can drive dedicated professors into grave despair.
Similar problems affect graduate students too.
“This was certainly my own experience,” the late anthropologist David Graeber wrote in an endnote in his book, “The Utopia of Rules.” “As one of the few students of working-class origins in my own graduate program, I watched in dismay as professors first explained to me that they considered me the best student in my class—even, perhaps, in the department—and then threw up their hands claiming there was nothing that could be done as I languished with minimal support—or during many years none at all, working multiple jobs, as students whose parents were doctors, lawyers, and professors seemed to automatically mop up all the grants, fellowships, and student funding.”
Likewise, the ~48,000-strong strike waged by University of California academic workers that started November 14 attests to related, ongoing — but importantly, not immutable — problems endemic to higher education in the US.
I’ll share another apropos anecdote from my past to underscore the issue.
When I was a doctoral student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, I was once tasked with working as a Teaching Assistant for three different classes despite the graduate program higher-ups later feeling compelled to realize the stipulated workload for that position was satisfied in full by just one of those courses. I received no extra pay commensurate with the overwork. But as a TA, I did fire back at a professor overseeing one of those three classes. (I discussed parts of that episode and what ensued in a piece I wrote several years back around this time of year.)
In retrospect, I might’ve refused to be ordered around and to be subjected to disrespect in a different manner that didn’t involve raising my voice just a bit. But the callous and cowardly reactions triggered by me standing up for myself speak volumes.
In the end, me raising my voice to the one professor, probably along with me affirming I’d be contacting the union representing graduate student workers on campus, resulted in the previously referenced assignment reduction, which made making my own academic progress actually a little less inconceivable.
But that didn’t happen before the graduate program director called the police and coaxed a cop to pay me a visit at my one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from SIUC campus.
Despite the impression Waywards readers may or might have, I generally dislike conflict and would rather not directly confront authority if that can be avoided. I also do not enjoy interactions with police. That’s not because I have deep-seated antipathy toward individual officers as human beings. Rather, it’s because punitive and terror-generating functions of policing pervade law enforcement.
When the officer arrived, he asked to come inside my place. I politely said we could speak outside my door in public space. He asked if I planned to hurt anyone or myself. I answered as calmly as I could in the negative, though maintaining composure can be hard when you’re bewildered by the interrogation and being questioned by someone with the authority to use violence and to incarcerate if interactions can be interpreted, rightly or wrongly, to justify that.
After the brief exchange, my encounter with the cop concluded without incident.1 To be sure, the police visit, initiated by a call from the graduate program director, could have resulted in a far worse outcome. It was a Black officer who arrived at my door. I’m a white guy. Were races with respect to those roles reversed, the likelihood of a bad outcome would’ve been that much greater.
To weave together loose strands, I’ll suggest punitive and too often harmful or deadly measures coexist in the higher education space with (and reinforce) socioeconomic and cultural relations of material deprivation and soul-crushing subordination.
I’ve come to the conclusion that building up the resolve in ways Jordan aimed to do during his career, as explained in “I Can’t Accept Not Trying,” helps steel a person enough to weather the assaults on human well-being and on the soul meted out by those who choose to reproduce an abusive and socially deleterious nexus. Steeling oneself in turn imbues a person with the fortitude needed to hazard attempts at addressing those institutional problems outlined above.
The experience-based insights that the best to ever put on a Bulls jersey shared in his short book as regards tackling enormous burdens incrementally with longer-term objectives in mind apply here too. That goal-oriented process paradoxically becomes less intimidating, harrowing and disheartening when, as Jordan suggested, you shoulder extra responsibilities on the road to realizing shared aims together with those you can rely on because they know they can rely on you.
***
Returning to the Auriemma-Ledbetter conversation, the UConn coach with almost a dozen D1 championships under his belt mentioned the difficulty involved in cultivating community and mutually affording relationships with players today.
“Because now,” he shared, “I have to work so hard at having a relationship with players. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they worked just as hard. But they don’t. They want you to work really hard to have a relationship with them, but that relationship only lasts … as long as you’re pretty much saying what they want to hear — and doing what they want to be doing.”
Auriemma’s observation points to a mess of multifactorial underlying causes, some already covered but others in need of fleshing out as we wrap up.
First, the coach is right, I think, to note a disconcerting sea change in the attitude of young adults. One of the reasons I stopped teaching college, aside from the fact adjunct work became financially untenable, has to do with the growing antagonism I sensed between me and students. The antagonism too often pits students against teachers and vice versa, fed, I suspect, by the dominant business model of higher education. The paradigm treats learning like an expensive commodity, one many students go deep into debt to purchase. They do that because a college degree functions as and can confer social and cultural capital, which unfortunately fewer and fewer people are now able to parlay into halfway decent professions post-graduation.
On top of that, pedagogical evaluation from professors assumes an increasingly punitive character. The exorbitant cost of college tuition and fees contributes, as does the already-lamented absence of community. That’s all compounded by a cutthroat labor market compelling graduates to swipe each other’s bread, to borrow Beal’s metaphor, lest they lose theirs. These factors insert the kind of competition that belongs on the basketball court at the highest levels into virtually every fabric of our lives and ways of relating to another, into places where it does not belong. And again, unlike with hoops, possibilities for parity and for closely-matched contests reside more in ideology and myth than in reality. That weighs on people, students and instructors included.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it also affects the coach-player relationship, directly or indirectly. As Auriemma acknowledged in speaking with Ledbetter, he and the professors his college athletes study under inhabit comparable roles, after all.
Auriemma’s point about the lack of effort players put into cultivating relationships with coaches might in part be attributed to the antagonism(s) and the underlying conditions discussed above. Those conditions can, on the one hand, produce privileged and entitled young ladies unmotivated to ever sacrifice for their coach, teammates or team. Conversely, the state of affairs can result in already overworked and overburdened young women understandably concerned as much with what their uncertain post-college futures hold for themselves, their families and the people who depend upon them.
To open up the “you gotta work” adage in that register, we can all better take into account those conditions with an eye on changing them, not just so some have opportunities to escape still-existing despair for decent lives. Instead, we might work to ensure everyone can take much-needed breaks to truly enjoy and savor creative, edifying and transformative experiences, like those basketball provides.
Altering those conditions, I might add, taking a page from Jordan’s book, can begin with improving yourself, which necessarily involves improving your relationships — the basis for building community and buttressing solidarity.
We might take seriously suggestions from both Jordan and Auriemma about putting in the self-sacrificing work to make others (and ourselves) better human beings.
***
Another legendary figure in the basketball world, Red Auerbach, who won nine NBA championships as head coach of the Boston Celtics before accumulating seven more titles as an executive, paved the way for revivifying the human condition more than a century ago.
“For all his skills as a teacher of the game, Red’s people skills were just as important,” documentary narration informs us in this basketballography short film.
In the documentary, former Celtics forward (later turned coach) Tom Heinsohn recounted how Auerbach helped make players believe the enterprise was really theirs.
With two minutes on the game clock, with the Celtics trailing by 10, Heinsohn said Auerbach would ask, “Has anybody got anything?” The coach expected his guys to provide input, to tell him what the team should do and to participate in those decisions affecting them.
“I respected Russell. I respected Cousy,” Auerbach said in the interview in the film. “And Heinsohn. And Ramsey. And all those guys. I respected them. They were college people. They were intelligent.”
Innovative and with old school grit, Auerbach affirmed and elevated their (often latent or under-developed) abilities and their humanity.
“Treat ‘em as men,” he said. “These are highly intelligent men.”
While the professional arena differs from collegiate sports, what Auerbach averred still applies to an important degree to NCAA student-athletes. We use the label “kids” as shorthand at times to refer to young persons who play in college, but they’re in actuality young adults. Unlike with high school programs, the official and relevant college labels refer to “men’s” and “women’s” basketball, as they should.
In the same vein, what five-time NBA MVP Bill Russell shared about Auerbach-coached teams speaks to the ethic Jordan wrote about — an ethos equally significant when it comes to making a difference and standing in solidarity with people off the court.
“We cared about each other, and we took care of each other,” Russell said for the camera. “I think the basic reason that [we were] so successful is that every one of those guys respected Red, and Red respected us.”
Earlier in the documentary, Russell shared how at the beginning of his career he blocked a shot and a referee called goaltending. Auerbach knew the official was wrong, and he got so fired up refs slapped him with a technical, which meant a lot to Russell, who told his coach it was “really cool” what Auerbach did for him in that moment.
“I can’t ask my players to fight for me if I won’t fight for them,” Russell remembered Auerbach sharing in response.
***
Getting back to Jordan’s book in closing, an upstanding level of commitment to other human beings and to the greater good, on and off the court, affords not only wins in basketball but also creates the conditions for us all to reach greater heights.
Folks who refuse to accept not trying — people who risk assisting themselves and others in reaching impressive heights — those who have “a certain vision, almost an ability to look ahead or to anticipate what’s coming,” as Jordan wrote on the penultimate page of his book, form the foundation for real success.
Of course, “along the way, you also have to stand up for what you believe and hold on to your convictions. All the people I admire do that,” Jordan wrote before listing individuals like Julius Erving and Martin Luther King on the final page of his book. “And they didn’t let anyone or anything distract them or break them down.”
His words, written almost thirty years ago, retain relevance, as do the words of others quoted above. Whatever Jordan’s personal foibles and faults, he indubitably got something (and, I’d say, an awesome amount) right. Taking him at his word, he did so because he couldn’t accept not trying. Even with all our own character defects, social ills and penetrating fears, perhaps we shouldn’t either.
As for me, I discovered that, compared to teaching college as a contingent faculty person, I have a greater passion for conveying ideas and compiling information through the written word. I truly enjoy investigating, researching, reporting, analyzing, reflecting philosophically and writing. And I enjoy trying to hone the craft that combines those skills.