Today Barry and I were watching the Final Four basketball play-offs, part of the NCAA March Madness tournament.
We’ve been watching it all along, and guess what? I’m actually enjoying watching it!
I always figured that if I was going to watch sports, it might as well be at the pro level — the players are better, so the game would be more exciting, right?
But Barry has taught me that college basketball is even more fun and inspiring, because anything can happen — with a little determination…
It’s a lot like life, actually:
Never give up until you’ve reached your goal.
Never underestimate your opponent — even if they’re the underdog.
Put your heart and soul into whatever you do, and you’ll get the results.
Teamwork always wins out over ego.
Early in the tournament, we saw Barry’s favorite team, the Duke Blue Devils, go down — even though he had expected them to make it through to the Final Four at least. Local Oregon native Kyle Singler, a freshman at Duke, is one of their best and most valued players… but in that game he got a lot of fouls and spent time on the bench, which left his team struggling.
Today, another two favorites — UCLA and North Carolina — lost out to Memphis and Kansas, respectively.
UCLA’s version of Singler is Kevin Love (another Oregon native and nephew of The Beach Boys’ Mike Love) and North Carolina’s is Tyler Hansbrough… all three of them are big white boys who put all their gusto into the game, and are responsible for many of the high-profile slam dunks in each game. Hansbrough has so much unbridled drive that he’s often seen sprawling on the cheerleaders or smashing into the cameras situated behind the basket after scoring.
But today, he didn’t have the same flair. Both Love and Hansbrough apparently like to play a certain way, manipulating the ball around the net, while Memphis and Kansas love to steal the ball and run the length of the court to score their points.
And in both cases, the latter won out — which should make for a very interesting game on Monday between Memphis and Kansas!
It’s sad to see senior players who get knocked out of the competition and know they’ll never play basketball to that level again. And it’s inspiring to see players coming back from behind or scoring against all odds.
All in all, there’s a lot of emotion and action involved in the game… the same keys that are required for manifesting what you want.
And I’m liking it!
Who would’ve thunk it?
Keep Unwrapping the Mysteries of Life!
