Persevere

I’m 13 and I’m playing in the first organized basketball game of my life. My uniform doesn’t fit, because I didn’t join the team until halfway into the season and was stuck with whatever was available. There’s two minutes left in the losing game, and so I am called from the end of the bench of people I don’t know by a coach I only met the week before. Hitching up my too-big-shorts the entire way, I make my way to the officials table to check in.

Aside from my parents, no one in the gymnasium, including my coach or teammates, really have any idea who I am. Just some kid with a weird accent and zero talent for the game of basketball. I check in and just point at the kid I’m replacing because I’ve forgotten his name.

The kid inbounding ball never looks my way, though to be fair I probably wasn’t in the right place anyway. I amble down the court holding up my shorts with one hand while the tank-top jersey threatens to spill off one shoulder in a way that would be provocative on a supermodel, but on me would just look like a pot roast falling out of a grocery bag.

The ball is passed around a couple of times and, through a series of mistakes I can’t fully explain, ends up in my hands. I take three steps and shoot the ball. Three things happen at that moment:

The first is that I get penalized for traveling — apparently you have to throw the ball at the ground periodically to move.

The second is that the ball flies over the entire backboard and lands out of bounds.

The third is that I say a word that is not welcome in eighth grade sporting events, and get called for a technical foul.

You will be surprised to learn at this point that I stayed on my high school’s basketball team until I graduated.

Whenever I think I’m not going to have the fortitude or determination to actually stick with something, I remember my time playing basketball in school. When I quit smoking, cold-turkey, there was a part of me that actively thought, “Well if I made it through that winter on eighth grade basketball, I can do this.” When I went back to college after five years away and virtually no transferable credits, I did so with a similar frame of mind.

This travesty of sport I described happened in 1985. My family had just moved from suburban Dallas to a small farm in southwest Wisconsin. It was November. It was cold as hell. But it was the tenth time we’d moved in my bakers-dozen years of life, so I was used to it all in a resigned, discouraged way. The past couple of moves hadn’t gone well for me, though, and I was naively was hanging a lot of hopes on the chance to change who I was and how I was perceived.

It started inauspiciously, as a weird kid with a muddy Southern accent in small-town Wisconsin I was on display, and historically speaking, close analysis from my peers had not traditionally worked in my favor. I joined the basketball team having never played anything more than an occasional game of HORSE against my dad on an offset backyard goal. I thought doing this would shape how others thought of me. To be fair, after that first game I did succeed in a ironic, genie-wish kind of way.

By the end of that first game, I was determined to quit.

I didn’t, though. Some of that credit goes to my parents, who encouraged me to stick with it. Even then, I still could have quit internally — just sleep-walked through practices. But, for some reason I didn't. I actually tried to improve. I was terrible at the game, but I pushed as hard as anyone on my team.

The rest of that season did not go well. Trying hard was a good strategy, but it did not yield quick results. Though my mom fixed the wardrobe malfunctions with a series of safety pins, my next effort on the court a couple of games later saw me dribble the ball off my awkward feet, sailing it into a crowd that was already filing out of the gym. I attempted a couple of more shots in the, perhaps, 10 minutes total I spent on the court that season. As I recall, only one of them came in any contact with the backboard or rim. No shot was successful.

And then the season was over.

I was as surprised as anyone when the winter of ‘86 saw me sign back up for JV basketball. If we had been a school of more than a few hundred, and if there had been enough people signing up to have a full bench, I certainly wouldn’t have made any kind of cut. But there was no cut, so I was assigned a jersey that actually fit, and I took to the court again.

It was the sixth or seventh game of the season, and we were losing by twenty or so to our arch-nemesis, Dodgeville. The JV coach, a highly encouraging and patient man who was a sharp contrast to the dour eighth-grade coach, called me from my well worn place at the end of the bench. I was in the game, with a couple of minutes on the clock.

When the ball hit my hands in the open court, the other team having sent in their own basketball rejects, I found myself in a pocket of open court poised for a fifteen-foot jumper. I pivoted toward the goal and let the ball sail.

When I die and look back on the moments that defined me, I will think of this shot, which arced through the air in a clean way that was distinctly different than every other shot I’d taken before. When it swished cleanly through the rim and net, I was honestly dumbfounded.

The other team was equally dumbfounded, not because I’d scored a goal, but because quite suddenly and without any warning at all, my team and the spectators who’d followed us to this away-game ass-kicking, suddenly erupted into a huge cheer. Down by twenty-something, people were jumping up and down, shouting as if we’d just won the State Championship.

It’s funny, because I didn’t actually realize that anyone had been cheering me along over the previous year and a half. Probably for a lot of that time, they hadn’t, but at some point I’d begun to win them over. Though my shooting percentage was somewhere in the single-digit percentages now, it was no longer zero, and half that gymnasium was celebrating that fact like it was VE Day.

This isn’t the part where I extol the virtues of sports as an avenue toward perseverance and self-confidence, though that was my path. The fact is that there’s a lot of different ways to get to those particular epiphanies. Instead what I’m saying is that I’m glad I learned early on, through some method, what it feels like to fail over-and-over again but not give up. For me it was a sport. For others it may be selling their first story to even the smallest publishers. For still others it may have been the first day on a job that had once seemed unattainable.

It’s a lesson I wish I remembered more often, because it has rarely steered me wrong to weather the storm. The few times it feels like it’s let me down, I wonder if that was just because eventually I let the adversity win.

I never became exceptional at basketball. I managed to start a couple of games by my junior year, when a couple of guys got hurt. But I was the only player on the team with a cheering section — on at least four or five occasions, they brought signs. There was the one game where I scored some 14 points and was on the court for most of the game, and though that was the exception, it was a glorious one.

In the end, no one cheered for me because of my basketball game. It obviously wasn’t about respect for my play, but I did win people over with something like bullheaded stubbornness. There were dozens of times, particularly early on, when the desire to quit was almost overwhelming, and then the next day would come. I’d show back up and I’d do the work. In the end, though it’s almost never quick, people end up seeing that, and it becomes harder and harder for them to keep you on the outside. Somewhere along the line, and without really noticing, I moved on to the inside, totally and completely, and that just became the de facto standard. It stopped being an issue, even though I still wasn’t that great — even though everyone still had access to that memory of some stupid, Southern kid hiking up his pants.

I mention all this, because it’s the reason I ever had any kind of success, including my time as a paid games writer. It’s one of the pieces of advice I’d give to anyone looking to break into writing, or the games industry at all. "How do you do it?" You fail, and then you show back up every single day to try it again. You do that until you don’t fail anymore, even if it takes years … which it probably will.

Comments

You wrote this article just so you could link it every time someone writes one of those email questions, didn't you?

Great read. I actually wish it were longer. I do not always think that about the Front Page articles, either.

You wrote this article just so you could link it every time someone writes one of those email questions, didn't you?

Actually, I'm planning to write that article in two weeks -- a more fleshed out version of how to -maybe- make it in games writing. Then, yes. I will link to it every time.

Great article. Sean, you've gotten me thinking about how I can help inspire a similar attitude of perseverance in my own young kids.

I have a PhD in molecular biology. Anytime someone tells me I'm "smart", I tell them no, being a PhD means you have Permanent Head Damage, since I was too dumb to quit.

I would say approximately 80-90% of my experiments ranged from providing partially valuable results (at best) to outright wastes of time and resources. I had at least 2 major breakdowns and a lab mentor who frankly did not believe in me. But through failed experiment after failed experiment v2.0, I learned that the true mark of a scientist is not just in critical thinking and experiment design, it is actually in troubleshooting and figuring out what went wrong and how to adjust. That's why they call it research. Because you usually have to search again. Otherwise, we would just call it "search".

Eventually I convinced my mentor, got published, and graduated. I held up my diploma in the auditorium as a collective middle finger to anyone who didn't believe.

That is a major lesson I have acquired in my life through literal blood, sweat and tears. Being too stupid and stubborn to give up has provided me more success than any intelligence or talent.

Don't give up.
Never give up.

...but if she's not calling you back, she might not be into you.

Budo wrote:

I have a PhD in molecular biology. Anytime someone tells me I'm "smart", I tell them no, being a PhD means you have Permanent Head Damage

Agreed! (Not about you, about degrees in general)

I had a similar epiphany to you, Sean. I had a completely different family life but I loved playing football. Started off in junior school - it was the break pastime... I was terrible and terrible is a very mild word for how bad I was. So bad I was the kid being picked last when teams were picked. I used to cry some times when I felt like nobody wanted me even though I tried really hard.

Fast forward to the age of 13/14 and I was in 3rd year of secondary school. I wasn't good at doing tricks or skills but I was persevering. We used to play form class vs form class and I played as a defender because I wasn't much good at anything else. I remember distinctly, one day after the umpteenth time I had tackled the opposing winger/striker, I looked down and saw that my shirt was ripped from the struggle. I was really upset and decided to leave the game but another guy in my team, a strong player that everyone liked came over to me and convinced me to stay on: "You're the only person who'll try and tackle that winger" he said. 'You're the only one. Everyone else just lets him through because they're afraid."

Now, I didn't want to admit that I was afraid of the guy as well - he was a bit of a psycho - but for some reason I could not relent. It gave me a lot of confidence... in playing football at least.

I never became a big football player but I continued improving over the years through to university- I would still play now if I had the chances - and I had quite a few times when my skill amazed me, quite a few of those incredible instances that I play back in my mind every now and again where what I pictured in the moment became reality upon my action.

There's nothing like it.

It's one of the reasons I loved and will always love Q3A and threewave. So many memories, it felt like I was one of those characters in DragonBall Z becoming SSJ3AXYZ etc. etc.

I played as a defender because I wasn't much good at anything else.

Don't believe that. It's on defense where intelligence and tenacity really pay off.

Thanks, though i meant it in a literal sense - i couldn't pass, dribble or shoot - the only thing i could do was tackle and run/close people down.

Basketball on the other hand i was pretty good at. Shame our team folded because we didn't have a coach.

This travesty of sport I described happened in 1985.

That's when I was born!

Budo wrote:

...but if she's not calling you back, she might not be into you.

Indeed, this is one place where the "don't give up" strategy breaks down. But that's a different topic.

My (high) school was a boys only gladiator academy. Music consisted of a room full of blokes bashing rocks (or each others' heads) together.
The school was famous for one thing. Football (soccer to you yanks). Which as a gangly 6ft 3" 14 year old, I was terrible at.
Thanks goodness that the other thing the school cherished was basketball. After a miraculous mid-court toss into the net to win at the end of a game deep into my third year, I had found something that got me positive recognition and would keep the idiots from throwing my homework out of the bus window on the way home from school every day.
Needless to say I spent every minute at school after that with a basketball in my hands, and went on to captain the school, and later college teams (which went undefeated).
Thanks for bringing those memories back to me Mr Sands.

ccesarano wrote:
This travesty of sport I described happened in 1985.

That's when I was born!

:D

I have game controllers older than you.

I always find these types of coming of age stories from the gamer community interesting. It actually makes me feel a little like an outsider some times because my adolescence was pretty good for the most part. I wasn't the most popular kid growing up but I was good at sports, one of the smartest kids in the school and relatively successful with girls. This isn't a chance to toot my own horn but to tell a story of a different kind.

I graduated and went off to study architecture at one of the best programs in the country. There were kids in my class with perfect SAT scores and I went from being the top of my class to average. Architecture school is a serious grind and requires a lot of time and effort no matter how smart or talented you are. I had to learn how to push myself persevere and learn from my failures. I am sure it was one of the best things I could have done to improve myself as a person. When most things come easy to you you aren't always best at overcoming adversity and that is something I have seen a fair amount of since college.

Sooner or later life will roll some dice that don't go your way. Everyone needs to learn how to push through the tough times, persevere and keep your spirits up even when everything seems hopeless. The things I have learned later in life make me wish I had had more empathy for others failings when I was younger. I try to remind myself now that "there but for the grace of God go I."

I wasn't the most popular kid growing up but I was good at sports, one of the smartest kids in the school and relatively successful with girls. This isn't a chance to toot my own horn but to tell a story of a different kind.

This story doesn't really get into it, but this describes how I ended up. Junior/Senior years I was very much in the "in" group, or at least that's how it felt. I had a huge circle of friends, and rarely went a weekend without a party to attend. In some ways, it was hard for me to leave high-school and I had several false starts having to rebuild from the ground up at college. The transition you describe is very familiar to me.

Gorthaur wrote:

I graduated and went off to study architecture at one of the best programs in the country. There were kids in my class with perfect SAT scores and I went from being the top of my class to average. Architecture school is a serious grind and requires a lot of time and effort no matter how smart or talented you are. I had to learn how to push myself persevere and learn from my failures. I am sure it was one of the best things I could have done to improve myself as a person. When most things come easy to you you aren't always best at overcoming adversity and that is something I have seen a fair amount of since college.

Sooner or later life will roll some dice that don't go your way. Everyone needs to learn how to push through the tough times, persevere and keep your spirits up even when everything seems hopeless. The things I have learned later in life make me wish I had had more empathy for others failings when I was younger. I try to remind myself now that "there but for the grace of God go I."

I didn't go into architecture, but that's otherwise my story. Right on.

Failure is the best. Anything worth doing involves banging your head against the wall until suddenly there is no wall (or at least it becomes a wall of pillows.)

I've felt like my artistic career so far has been a long, slow march from being rejected by everyone, to being rejected by the cream of the crop.

ccesarano wrote:
This travesty of sport I described happened in 1985.

That's when I was born!

I now picture you being born in the stands, while this game is happening.

Gorthaur wrote:

Architecture school is a serious grind and requires a lot of time and effort no matter how smart or talented you are.

That is certainly what they tell you. And the reward is making in the same range as a teacher when you graduate where I live. Not 'lots of money' like most people think. I actually found a groove that I learned from someone else (who was 3 years my junior) that got me out of that grind with about a month left in school. The guy I learned it from found that groove from the outset of his education and did quite well.

In case you're wondering, we went to Virginia Tech, which is/was at the time, among the top 5 rated undergrad architecture programs, and the norm was regular late nights / all nighters. I regret thinking I had to do that until nearly the end. Mostly because some of my worst work came from those times.