You can always go to GOAT Mountain

There are shortcuts to success but none that take you to greatness. Success is often taken to be a matter of being name-recognized or face-recognized, but that’s only for a while. A reasonable enough goal, certainly, and many are more than happy to get there. They are more likely than not to be ready to adopt the limited wisdom of the adage ‘by any means necessary’. Greatness is something else though. 

Bernadus Carnotensis, a twelfth-century French Neo-Platonist philosopher, better known as Bernard of Chartres, once spoke of discovering truth by building on previous discoveries. Isaac Newton’s version is the most quoted, ‘if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Greats. 

The late Kobe Bryant worked hard and relentlessly to get to where he got in basketball. If he hit airballs he tried to find out the reason. Weak legs, he figured. He worked hard to strengthen his legs. No airballs thereafter. Done. 

That was not all. There were times when he couldn’t get around something. Then he visited, in his words, GOAT Mountain. GOAT as in ‘Greatest of All Time.’  Obviously that implies just one individual, but there’s always a debate about the GOAT of any sport. Bryant covered all the bases. He went to all the available peaks in the mountain range: Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Hakeem Olajuwon, Jerry West, Oscar Robinson and Bill Russell.

Sure, he wanted to be better than MJ and was dismissed as an arrogant kid when he said so at the age of 17. And yet, there was utmost respect and that respect was returned by MJ and others. 

The greats are almost always generous with advice and like all true greats they recognize and nurture potential greats. Like Kobe Bryant. They would respond, of course, to the not-so-great or even the pedestrian, but there’s particular delight in offering tips to those who had it in them not just to be great but to surpass the advising great. 

Kobe visited GOAT Mountain. Now that alone won’t do, obviously. You need focus. Discipline. Exercise. Fellow travelers on the path to greatness. Great teachers. The GOATS are there, but there are not hands-on teachers. They inspire and spending time with them or even being in their presence can fuel the determination to become better at what you do. However, for a variety of reasons it’s not everyone who pencils in ‘Visit GOAT Mountain’ in the must-do notebook.  Kobe did.  It must have helped. 

It’s not a basketball story. It’s a soccer story. It’s a tennis story too. Name a sport and you’ll find there’s always a GOAT Mountain. There are GOATs. Name a field of science and you’ll find scientific GOATs. It’s the same in the social sciences. The arts. Literature. Politics. Even party politics. Specific fields of business. Manufacturing. Advertising. Services. Agriculture. 

GOATs are libraries. Archives. Repositories of secrets gathered through handwork, discipline, engagement and years. AND the GOATs who came before. 

Kobe always figures in discussions about the GOAT in basketball. Is it Jordan or LeBron, someone will ask and immediately the audience will divide into pro-MJ and pro-Bron. However, someone might chip in, ‘how about Kobe?’  The debate never ends and the true greats really don’t care about such things. 

MJ scored 32,292 points in his NBA career. When LeBron passed him in May 2019, he did it in a pair of Nikes with ‘Thank you M.J.’ written on the side. ‘MJ was like lightning in a bottle for me, because I wanted to be like him,’ Bron said. MJ congratulated him. 

On January 26, 2020, LeBron passed Kobe and moved to third place (behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone) and Kobe tweeted, ‘Continuing to move the game forward @KingJames. Much respect my brother.’

A few hours later Kobe Bryant was dead. And the basketball world wept. 

That’s another story. All that we need to understand is that there are mountains. GOAT mountains. The GOATS are down to earth folk, but you have to go to GOAT Mountain to meet them, climb on their shoulders and see further than they could see. They will not mind.

This article was first published in the DAILY NEWS [February 17, 2020]

malindasenevi@gmail.com

Other articles in the series 'In Passing...':  [published in the 'Daily News' on Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week]

Let's learn the art of embracing damage

Kandy Lake is lined with poetry

There's never a 'right moment' for love

A love note to an unknown address in Los Angeles

A dusk song for Rasika Jayakody

How about creating some history?

How far away are the faraway places?

There ARE good people!

Re-placing people in the story of schooldays 

When we stop, we can begin to learn

Routine and pattern can checkmate poetry

Janani Amanda Umandi threw a b'day party for her father 

Sriyani and her serendipity shop

Forget constellations and the names of oceans

Where's your 'One, Galle Face'?

Maps as wrapping paper, roads as ribbons

Yasaratne, the gentle giant of Divulgane

Katharagama and Athara Maga
Victories are made by assists
Lost and found between weaver and weave
The Dhammapada and word-intricacies
S.A. Dissanayake taught children to walk in the clouds
White is a color we forget too often
The most beautiful road is yet to meet a cartographer

The Eldest: a story written on face and in eyes

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Who should take the last shot?

It happens in close games. You make a shot just as time is running out and you can either tie, sending the game to overtime, or you can win the game for your team. Buzzer beaters, that’s what they are called in basketball. 

This is about buzzer beaters. The thinking is solely that of my friend and fellow hoops fan, Tony Courseault. He was commenting on a Toronto Raptors game a few weeks ago. The Raptors had made a fierce comeback with a minute and 10 seconds left, to shave an 11 point deficit to a deuce. AND they had the last possession. 

Here’s Tony’s commentary:

‘And what did they do? They give it to Kawhi Leonard and had everybody else clear out. The worst single effing basketball play in the history of all sports.  Kawhi had almost nothing to do with the comeback, and yet the team and the coaching strategy just gave him the keys for the last gratuitous, hero shot.  An unnecessary 3-point attempt.  No passing On that last possession. No movement with the other players. Nothing.  All of a sudden I don’t like the raptors anymore.’

For the record the Raptors are in second place in the Eastern Conference of the NBA, just 1.5 games behind the Milwaukee Bucks.

Tony started off his comment with a broadside: ‘Tonight’s rockets raptors game illustrates perfectly how Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have destroyed basketball.’ He would explain, subsequently, but by way of counterpoint, consider this comment a day or two later:

‘Did you see the end of that Boston Golden State game last night? It was a two point game and the Celtics have a ball with five seconds left but The ball moved and found the open man… Marcus Morris. Had a great look but just missed. Happens. At that point I realized the Celtics were back and they will beat the Raptors.  They fired an excellent coach and got his back up. Toronto deserves what they get.’

Back to Kobe and Michael.

‘I went to a huge playoff game years ago with some friends. The Lakers were up 3 - 1 against Steve Nash in the Phoenix Suns. This was after Shaq or before Gasol, the Lakers were the seventh seed and the Suns were the second seed. TREMENDOUS upset in the making.  The Lakers had Kwame Brown and Andrew Bynum as their centers. Not all-stars. But the game plan was to go inside out. Phil Jackson emphasized this to his team by having them watch the movie, The Inside Man, by Denzel Washington

‘So this was game six and the series was at 3 to 2.  The inside out game was working to perfection… Until this game.  All of a sudden, Kobe completely abandons a game plan and just started shooting wildly. He scored 50 points. The Lakers lost in overtime. Kobe was not criticized. But the last possession illustrated just how egregious Kobe’s decision making was. 

‘With 18 seconds left, Kobe has the ball, languorously dribbling the ball and time away at near half court.  Just standing and dribbling. Again, the game is tied and any score wins the series in what would have surely not only been one of the nba’s biggest upsets, but Kobe and Phil’s sweetest victory.  7 seconds, 6...5...4...3...2...Kobe wants to shoot a 3 pointer over his defender but by now they’ve doubled and he’s forced to jack up a wild, fall away 3 that doesn’t even touch the rim.  Ideally, with 18 seconds left, I would’ve liked to have seen the ball move around naturally. But, let’s say that Kobe wanted to be the hero. He should have driven to the basket for a two pointer that he can make over anybody, or all the way to the basket and get the certain whistle and foul shots to ice the game and series. 

Nothing like seeing that in real life and just how bad he read the defense or ignored the best set of options. He did it the first five games, so he knew how to do it and was willing earlier. After that series, Kobe kind of lost me. Even after winning two more titles.’

And he had this to say about Jordan:

‘The difference with Jordan was, quite frankly, he made more of those shots and his teams won. But like the Golden state warriors and their prolific three point shooting, it’s the talent that transcends conventional playing. It’s not recommended for others. But everybody from California to China is playing this way now. So when you try to play like the Warriors, or Michael Jordan, without the same ability, It results in you being dominated over and over and over again like groundhogs day. If the bad boy Detroit Pistons try to do fast break like the streaking Los Angeles Lakers, they would not have had a chance. But they played graded out basketball and toppled Magic Johnson and the mighty Lakers.’

It’s easy to say stuff from the sideline and after the game, this we must remember. On the other hand, professional basketball players are supposed to be just that. Professional. God-like status on account of achievements allow players to get away with what could be called brain-fade. True, it’s a split-second decision at times, but in the instances referred to above, there was enough time to play with. 

Had Kawhi had made the shot, all this would have been forgotten by most, except the likes of Tony Courseault who is a true student of the game. Even a made shot doesn’t justify the kind of play that Kawhi, his coach and the Raptors had scripted. 

It’s a simple truth that’s often forgotten. Greatness is one thing, but even the greats have to play second fiddle in certain situations. There are periods, perhaps lasting a quarter or even just a few minutes, when other players come to the party, when the superstars take a back seat. If going with what works makes sense, Kawhi should not have had the ball in the dying seconds of that game. Neither should Kobe have indulged in grandstanding. It cost the Raptors a game and the Lakers a series, respectively. That’s a huge price to pay.  

OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES [THE INTERCEPTION] PUBLISHED IN 'THE SUNDAY MORNING'

The 'done thing' is rarely done

'Practice, lots of practice'

Special, always and forever

The shortcut to greatness

It's healthy to retire the braggadocio 

Money talks, gold rules: are we ok with that?

Sometimes if you don't stand up, you fall

Selections and the political economy of disappointment

So who is the GOAT?

Predecessors are great teachers

When things go wrong check the fundamentals

There's always only one more game left

Mind games are part of the sporting story

Those nervous ninetiesOut-think the opposition
School sports and parents

The importing mania in school cricket

Sportsmen and sportswomen beware: your accounts will be hacked soon!

Not all victories are recorded

malindasenevi@gmail.com

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