When I coached football, I’d tell my players that “life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you respond to it.” It was a way to get them to focus on themselves and on the things they could control – and to get them to understand that they were ultimately the authors of their own destinies.
It didn’t mean they weren’t on a team: football isn’t a game for committed individualists. It did mean, though, that when events unfolded – when they found themselves far downfield and wide open, or when they found themselves knocked flat by linemen twice their size – the measure of themselves was revealed in the very next moment.
You don’t know a player by what’s done to him. You know him by what he does.
GREG GUTFELD: ANYTHING POSITIVE ABOUT AMERICA NOW HAS TO BE REIMAGINED AS HORRIBLE
It’s a lesson America could use now. My teams looked a lot like America – and they worked a lot like how America is supposed to work.
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Every race, every ethnicity, and every point of origin was represented among our players across my career. They all had two things in common. The first was that they were passionately committed to making Notre Dame Football the country’s best – and a few times, they succeeded. The second was that each of them earned their spot. Yes, they were diverse, but the diversity wasn’t the reason for their presence. Every single player who wore the Notre Dame uniform deserved to do it.
That’s meritocracy. But why use the five-dollar word? I was born in West Virginia and raised in Ohio: out there, we just call it the American way.
There are a lot of enemies of the American way these days – right here in America. They’re men and women, mostly elites from academia and media, who would, if they could, walk into a football locker room and tell the players the exact opposite of my counsel: “life is 90% what happens to you, and 10% how you respond to it.” Then, having said that, they would probably demand to know why the team was gender imbalanced. Then, having said that, the team – now dispirited and infused with a victim mentality – would head out to the field to lose.
It’s fashionable now to lament failures in our history, but that myopic focus ignores the triumph of the present.
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