Billy Martin said, “There is nothing greater in the world than when someone on the team does something good, and everybody gathers around to pat him on the back."
I once asked a number of successful sports figures what they considered the best thing about sports. Within this group was a common refrain.
Gene Upshaw, who passed away in August 2008, was a Pro Football Hall of Fame offensive lineman and the long-time executive director of the NFL Players Association. He had this to say about the best thing in sports:
“The camaraderie you build with your teammates and the people that are involved in the sport. You take that with you wherever you go. You can never ever let it go. And anyone who has participated has that feeling.
“You’re in this unique fraternity, and it’s there for a lifetime: good, bad, indifferent; winning, losing, traveling, crying—all of it. It’s the camaraderie. It’s the greatest thing that you get out of this. The relationships you build through that.”
Gail Goodrich, a basketball Hall of Famer, echoed Upshaw: “The camaraderie of being with your teammates, having a common goal, and working together toward it,” said Goodrich. “That first year after you retire, there is an adjustment. The biggest thing you miss is that association with the team.”
Jerry West was in the same backcourt on the Lakers with Goodrich for two different terms. One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players, West, who later built championship teams as an executive with the Lakers, said, “The harshest lessons learned in life are probably through sports. There is no gray area. You either win or you lose. And I think it tests the character of all players. It tests the character of the people working internally. And it can lead to hastily made decisions that sometimes damage a franchise more than they would ever help because people don’t want to lose.
“I think management has a great responsibility to the ownership, almost to the point where I believe that you should lose your job if there’s something that the owner wants to do and it’s just not the right thing to do because it is an emotional thing. I do think that were all at risk sometimes because we’re opinionated and we think we know what’s best for the team, and we don’t own the team.
“I like to think I’d never work for money in my life. I do it because I love it. Obviously it’s important to get paid if you’re in a business like this. But I think the most important thing is, if somebody hires you, they should trust your instincts enough to let you run the team and for them to not interfere with some things that maybe they’re not very familiar with.”
Randy Vataha enjoyed success in college (Stanford) and in the NFL (New England Patriots) as an undersized receiver. Looking back on his playing career, Vataha, the president of Game Plan LLC, said, “One of the reasons I enjoyed playing football is you have so many teammates to share the experience with. Every year, like a lot of people, I’ll get near a television when that ball comes down on New Years’ Eve in Times Square. And you say, ‘Why would all those people get there 10-15 hours in the cold before that ball drops down? Why do they do that?’ And it’s really to share an experience with everybody else.
“Well, when I played at Stanford, the team had not been to the Rose Bowl in almost 20 years. So, to be able to win the Pac-8 and share that with your teammates, and to be able to go on to win the Rose Bowl, was a phenomenal experience. A lot of those guys have been dear friends for life, and they were all sort of forged within that teamwork. You can’t ever replace those kinds of experiences with your teammates.”
Al Leiter, who pitched for the Yankees, Mets, Marlins, and Blue Jays before moving into the broadcast booth at YES and the MLB Network, said, “I have yet to meet a teammate, or even an athlete from another sport, who is not highly competitive. And I know after 20 years professionally—15 or 16 years in the major leagues—what continues to drive my love for the game is to compete at the pinnacle of my industry. To face the greatest players in the world and make quality pitches to get them out. It’s a rush. It’s a tremendous degree of satisfaction, even in the smallest battles.
“As a player, my perspective is about competition and winning. And it has to be [the same] as a fan. And I would say sports are encompassed by the desire to watch competition at its best with the feeling of euphoria or sorrow with a win or a loss next to your team.”
Offering perspective on the best thing about sports from the front office, Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay said, “It’s the opportunity to compete in a game as a grownup. What I enjoy is that on Sundays you get to have your team compete against their team and see who wins. I like the fact that as adults we still get to play or be involved in a game that’s usually reserved for younger people.”
Pat Williams, senior vice president of the Orlando Magic, has spent a full life in sports as a player and executive. He cited the relationships you make as among the best things sports offer.
“The people you are involved with—the coaches, the athletes, the media,” said Williams. “You just do not meet those kind of people in any other walk of life. I ran into a man who grew up in the Philadelphia area. He was almost in tears talking about what the 1983 76ers meant to him and to his father and to his neighborhood. This man…was very emotional. And that just brought back to me the power of sports. And the impact it has on people’s lives.”
Sports journalist and broadcast pioneer John Walsh once said, “The best thing about working in sports at ESPN is that there is a range of different possibilities every day. There are different mediums. There are different types of stories. You can come to work and be talking about Kobe Bryant on the court and his spectacular play, or the Kobe Bryant fall from grace off the court, which is an interesting, dramatic story as well. There is laughter and tears, all kinds of emotional stories that come about on a daily basis.
“What’s happened in sports in the last quarter-century has been so overwhelmingly breathtaking and widespread that sports have come to represent life in America and the range of experiences, and the range of stories to cover is pretty astonishing.”
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