you're tougher than you think you are

We've got a motto here-you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.

Christopher McDougall

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 2011. 

fighting through injuries

Bird’s legacy was flush with examples of valiant performances while fighting through injuries, including persistent elbow troubles, double bone spurs in his heels (which eventually required surgery), and a chronic back condition that plagued him in the final six seasons of his career.

In 1982, while Bird was vying for a rebound against Milwaukee, he was elbowed by big man Harvy Catchings on the side of his cheek. The pain in his face and his jaw was excruciating. His skull had been depressed by the blow, but Bird refused to come out and finished the game. Afterward, Dr. Silva sent him to the hospital, where doctors drilled a hole in the side of his head and inserted a medical apparatus to pop his zygotic arch back out.

Bird hated sitting out so much that he often didn’t tell his coaches when he suffered an injury. When Dell Curry tagged him with an elbow and fractured his eye orbiter in the mid-eighties, Bird ran around in the second half with double vision.

“I was seeing two baskets,” he confessed. “I had to guess which one to shoot at.”

After the game, when he noticed blood dripping from his nostril, he blew his nose, causing his eye to protrude grotesquely.



When the Game Was Ours, by Larry Bird, Earvin “Magic” Johnson & Jackie MacMullan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009

made the cactus in his own image

If God would choose a plant to represent him, I think he would choose of all plants the cactus. The cactus has all the blessings he tried, but mostly failed, to give to man. Let me tell you how. It has humility, but it is not submissive. It grows where no other plant will grow. It does not complain when the sun bakes it back or the wing tears it from the cliff or drowns it in the dry sand of the desert or when it is thirsty. When the rain comes it stores water for the hard times to come. In good times and in bad it will still flower. It protects itself against danger, but it harms no other plant. It adapts perfectly to almost any environment. It has patience and enjoys solitude. In Mexico there is a cactus that flowers only once every hundred years and at night. This is saintliness of an extraordinary kind, would you not agree? The cactus has properties that heal the wounds of men and from it come potions that can make man touch the face of God or stare into the mouth of hell. It is the plant of patience and solitude, love and madness, ugliness and beauty, toughness and gentleness. Of all plants, surely God made the cactus in his own image? It has my enduring respect and is my passion.


Doc's speech to Peekay's born-again Christian mother in The Power of One By Bryce Courtenay 518 pages. Random House.