Thank you John Grisham for the "Best Book Ever"

Best book ever if you are still wrestling with the memories of a coach who pushed you way harder than anyone had a right to push. Sometimes fiction has a way bringing understanding to me that instruction, education or study never could. Every once in a while, by chance, I will read a really good book that so dramatically affects me that I have to try and get away from it for a while to be sure my initial impression is true.

 

This book is one of those books. Over a month ago I could not put it down. I read it over two nights and must admit it has changed how I look at my past. Growing up I played a lot of sports. A lot. And In doing so had a lot of coaches. Some great and some, not so much. Like John Grisham, I played football and was not an all-American. Unlike him I do not have a gift for fiction. In, "Bleachers" he tells an incredibly moving story of an all-American football player who has returned home as an adult for the eminent death of his estranged legendary high school football coach.

This book struck me on so many levels I do not know where to start. I am glad I waited for this story to sink and in doing so was able to find a deeper more significant moral that now I must share. Those who have made us greater than we are or could have ever hoped to have been without them are very, very special people. Love them or hate them we are their legacy. A legacy is not what people leave us, but what they leave inside us. I believe the human heart is a blend of our intellect and soul. I know in my heart that my father, my greatest coach, left me a legacy I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand and appreciate.

This little book that I bought for 50 cents to save it from a dumpster did more to further this understanding and appreciation than anything, save the love I have for my wife and the birth of my own three children.

My dad had a coach like the one in this book. They had experienced the kind of success described in this story. In his senior year at Maryland my dad, under the legendary coach Tatum went undefeated and in the 1952 Sugar Bowl defeated #1 ranked Tennessee. The book helped me understand why he spoke so little of his coach and how he always seemed to diminish the magnitude of such an accomplishment. I think sometimes people are so close to your heart and buried so deep in your soul that to speak of them distorts your very essence.

As I read this book I could only think about myself and the great men who coached me over the years. The best being Coach Rodger Manuel, who first cut me from the eighth grade basketball team, but believed enough in me to advance me to varsity baseball as a sophomore. Coach Cameron and Coach Rose, my high school and college football coaches still ramble around in my heart and mind and I may never know or be able to articulate how I feel about them, but their affect on my life is immeasurable. Both these men made me make similar stands as the primary character in this book. Both these men made me the man I am today and for that I am begrudgingly grateful.

As this book has set in I think more and more about my Dumb Dumb Daddy O. He was a great coach. He was an awesome father. He is in my very heart, soul and mind.

Thank you John Grisham for the greatest football story ever.

why joy?

The post that precedes this one was a major style change. I wrote it in the classic Facebook inspirational post style because that is how I saw it in my head. Late in the afternoon on Friday I got the bad news I didn't get the job in Nashville. On Wednesday morning I got the call I had made it to the final three and was invited to interview in Nashville 8am Thursday. It was four hours of intense interviewing with a national director, operations manager, and two district business managers from Pfizer. After booking the flights and hotel arrangements and in the next 24 hours speaking to 6 of 9 team members of the district I would be joining, studying all the research I had gathered on the key accounts of the territory I would be working, learned the specifics of the managed care environment for Tennessee, familiarized myself with the human growth hormone drugs I would sell, studied the disease states of Human Growth Hormone Deficiency and Macromegaly, arranging for two letters of reference emails for the interview team, traveling halfway across the country and back on less than 2 hours of sleep and by 5pm Friday back at my desk taking the call that I didn't get it. Once again Pfizer very politely said they didn't want me. Saturday morning I woke up severely depressed. It was a horrible funk. I was so upset I found myself avoiding my family because I was afraid I would loose it. I just felt like crying.

Later that morning I saw on my Blackberry an email from the national director who I had interview with and he had sent a reply to my thank you email from the day before. He obviously knew I wasn't the chosen one, but he sent a reply that changed everything. He said he hoped my youngest daughter's ear infection would heal quickly and wished my family a joyful weekend while baptizing my other daughter. And there it was. There was all kind of joy to be had and I wasn't letting it happen. I cried tears of joy in a very hot shower and all I could think was, "Joy Will Happen if I Let It...Joy Will Happen if I Let It...Joy Will Happen if I let It!" And It did. I got myself out of the way and there it was. My wife introduced Chloe to the congregation in awesome fashion and I performed the baptism and we celebrated later with friends at the Golden Corral. There was real joy in our family. The kind of Joy I had been standing in the way of since Christmas morning almost a month earlier. Being laid of is stressful, but I now refuse to allow any worldly circumstance to exclude me and my family of the Joy God has given us.

Joy will happen if you let it.

joy

Joy

Will happen

If you

 let it.

Get it?