By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
The other night, several of us got together over Zoom. We grew up in The Bronx, went to school together, and played sports together. Lion, Bowser, Husk, Roy Boy, Shats, Bug. I was “Alt” in those days. I would’ve preferred Lance Kool, but Alt was the name that stuck.
We spoke about those who were no longer with us and playing softball, football, and roller hockey, sharing stories of glory days when we were young and growing up. During the hour we spent with one another, I would share my screen and post pictures of places in our old neighborhood that we would all remember that were long since gone.
We learned in school the importance of doing things by ourselves. We were responsible for our own grades. We had homework to do and we did it ourselves, although from time to time we would call one another to get some help on a particularly tough assignment. We laughed about particular teachers who were difficult and reminisced that although they were hard, we got some of our best lessons from them.
One lesson I learned was that when you let someone copy from your test in fifth grade, you both get caught and punished (thanks). You learn to do things by yourself and take responsibility for your failures in school.
But sports were different. We learned to cooperate and work together for the common goal of beating the crap out of the other team. Although we marveled at our memories of Stone hitting a ball onto the elevated tracks of the subway from the park on Jerome Avenue, and laughed at how Bug skated in on a breakaway with me in goal and continued in, rolling up my arm as I lay down in front of the goal to block it (I did block the shot), our stories were about working together, playing together and learning together.
We learned to lead and to follow. We learned that we each had a role in the greater good if we wanted to win. We needed to be versatile. Doing things together was fun and helped us to succeed.
It is the rare schoolteacher who could come up with a comparable lesson to sports to illustrate the importance of collaboration. I never met her or him but enjoy a story that is regularly shared about those lessons.
The story goes that a teacher brought a lot of balloons to school one day and asked her students to blow them up and write their names on one of them. After they did that, they were told to toss the balloons into the hall where the teacher walked through and mixed them up.
They were then given three minutes to find the balloon with their name on it and couldn’t.
The teacher then told them to pick up the balloon that was closest to them and bring it to the student whose name was on it. They accomplished this in about 45 seconds.
The story goes that the teacher said to the students, “These balloons are like happiness. We won’t find it when we’re only searching for our own. But if we care about someone else’s happiness, it will ultimately help us find our own.”
Personally, I don’t believe this ever happened how it’s told. But I believe that as is the case with the lessons from sports, it is an example of how we are better when we work with others than when we work by ourselves.
Leadership, thus, is the lesson of how this happens and how we inspire others to help one another be better than we might individually. Winners find the way to win. They can do it because we placed them in the position to be their best selves and succeed. They have a game plan that works, not all the time, but more times than not.
They adapt to change and persevere in the face of opposition. They defeat procrastination and focus on the prize and correct their mistakes.
In The Bronx, the group of us learned to do that. We’ve gone into the world and helped businesses grow in our own businesses succeed. Some of us became self-employed; some were employees. In all cases, we took the lessons of sports and sacrifice into the world and became winners in doing so.
The lessons that we learned today about sports are more about how much someone earns, the examples of failure, and less about the price that we pay to be successful. It is all about celebrity and less about sacrifice and perseverance.
Luck plays a big part in it but not all of it. It’s all about the team that you surround yourself with and their willingness to pay the price to get to where everyone wants to get to.
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2020, 2021, 2024, 2025
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