DON’T SHIRK THE WORK
Talent is never enough. With few exceptions the best players are the hardest workers.
—MAGIC JOHNSON
The harder you work the harder it is to surrender.
—VINCE LOMBARDI
For six years I spent my summers in the mountains of Flagstaff, training-camp home of the NFL Cardinals. At seven thousand feet, breathing in the clean pine-scented air, players began the task of preparing themselves physically and mentally for the grind of the upcoming season. Under the bright July sun, rookies hoping to make the team and veterans battling to keep their jobs ran sprints, or gassers. They put on pads and banged heads in practice twice a day.
We all want to win. Every athlete wants to succeed. But the ones who do are those who separate wanting from being willing to make the sacrifice that winning demands. After the first few days of practice, at high altitude, I could look into players’ eyes, observe their body language, and tell which ones were determined to pay the price to make their dreams come true. One of those players was Ricky Proehl.
I met Ricky in 1990 after his senior season at Wake Forest. He attended the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis. At the combine, hundreds of pro prospects are interviewed, weighed, measured, timed, examined, and evaluated in advance of the league’s spring draft. As the Cardinals’ team counselor, I interviewed dozens of players. I liked Ricky Proehl immediately. This cocky wide-out from New Jersey didn’t fit the NFL prototype. Most scouts thought he was undersized and probably not fast enough to compete against the pro game’s hiccup-quick cornerbacks and safeties. But I liked his attitude, and I admired his confidence.
Proehl had led Wake Forest in receiving three years in a row. He set the school record for career receptions. He saw himself playing in the NFL, just as a young Dwight Smith saw himself wearing a Cubs uniform in Wrigley Field. Other prospects who had competed against Proehl in the Atlantic Coast Conference offered testimonials to his work ethic: “Ricky Proehl? He comes at you, play after play.” “He runs perfect routes.” “The guy’s a fighter. He never quits.” I hoped the Cardinals would draft him, and they did in the third round.
Ten years later, late in the fourth quarter of the NFC championship game, the St. Louis Rams broke from the huddle. They trailed Tampa Bay, 6-5, a baseball score. Less than five minutes remained. Kurt Warner, the Rams’ quarterback, called the play: Flex Left Smoke Right 585 H-Choice. At the snap the team’s fourth receiver took off down the left sideline. He looked up into the dome lights, eyes widening. Here it came, a tight spiral. The receiver fended off a defender with his right arm and caught the ball with his left.
Touchdown. That thirty-yard catch won the game and sent the Rams to the Super Bowl and put number eighty-seven—Ricky Proehl—on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “This is what I dreamed about playing in the NFL for ten years,” Proehl said that day. The kid from Wake Forest, traded by the Cardinals to a losing team in Seattle and then to a bad team in Chicago and later to a 4-12 team in St. Louis, took a lap around the Trans World Dome, clutching the George Halas NFC championship trophy.
Lars Anders at the University of Florida, writing in a paper on “Deliberate Practice,” said he found it takes ten years of practice to acquire the mastery of an expert. Ricky Proehl has been catching footballs for a long time, but it took him ten years of hard work to become an overnight success.
In sports, as in life, there is no substitute for commitment. Vince Lombardi called it heart power. “A man can be as great as he wants to be,” the Hall of Fame coach said. “If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive, and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done. Once a man has made a commitment … he puts the greatest strength in the world behind him. It’s something we call heart power. Once a man has made this commitment, nothing will stop him short of success.”
Listen to Tony Gwynn, one of baseball’s best hitters: “It’s easy to cheat yourself and do just enough to get by, but that’s what everybody can do, just enough to get by. But those who want to be successful and maintain that level of success have got to push a little bit harder and do a little bit more.”
Rod Carew says he has seen many baseball players blessed with God-given ability who simply didn’t want to work. “They are soon gone,” Carew says. “I’ve seen others with no ability to speak of who stayed in the big leagues for fourteen or fifteen years… . You have to want to do the work.”
Andre Agassi fell from the top of the tennis world to number 141 in the rankings. Determined to resurrect his career, he committed to the belief that if he worked himself into top physical shape no one could beat him. “You have to work hard and establish yourself all over again or else it’s real easy to have a bad day,” Agassi said. Watching him during his inspiring comeback, you could see Agassi was willing to stay out on the court for as long as he had to to beat his chief rival, Pete Sampras.
Rob Evans transformed the Ole Miss basketball program into a powerhouse. This is what Evans, now head coach at Arizona State, tells his players: “Hey, you might not be as good as Michael Jordan, but there isn’t any reason you can’t play with as much effort and enthusiasm as he does. No matter where you are talent-wise, you always can play hard.”
How about you? Have you made a commitment to this book? Reading the lessons for enjoyment is fine. But results come only after you cross that line and say you’re going to answer the questions and do the exercises. Mental skills, like physical skills, only improve if you do the work.
One of my favorite quotes is from former tennis great Bjorn Borg. “I remember how I used to take the train to Stockholm every day after school to play, coming home late, studying, getting up to go to school, getting on the train again, all those years. It has gotten results. But even if it hadn’t, even if I wasn’t able to become a champion, I would still know that I gave it my best shot. I tried. I got on the train and I tried.”
Have you boarded the train? Are you on track? If not, what are you waiting for?
It takes years of hard work to become an overnight success. Are you willing to make the commitment and pay the price?