First Time for Everyone

There is a first time for everyone, and this blog will be mine!  I thought long and hard about the best way to express myself and low and behold the smart one in my family (my lovely wife) convinced me to start a blog.  She is smart because she lives with my incessant need to talk about basketball and life and everything in between.  I am a born and raised Los Angeles Lakers fan to the core!  As you may have heard we were quite humbled by the now 2011 NBA Champion Dallas Mavericks!  As bitter as I was to lose in the 2nd round, some of that bitterness was made a little easier to swallow in seeing the Mavericks totally dismantle the now supremeply hated Heat!  I am the first one to admit I absolutely detested the Heat from the moment a certain LBJ declared he was "Taking His Talents to South Beach"!  Seeing the Heat fail on the biggest stage made me realize a few things in my much less wealthy and commercialized life.  The first is that heart, commitment, dedication and desire only exists in the eye of the beholder.  The second is the quintessential difference between NBA players and me!  If I lose at all in my occupation, I lose my job, don't collect 200 dollars for passing go, and begin the weekly fun of applying for jobs just to get my $500 dollars a week in unemployment.  The now hated Heat have lost on the biggest stage with all watching, and yet they go home to their multi million dollar homes and still get paid millions even after the now looming work stoppage, with lucrative endorsement deals.  Now don't call me bitter, because if I was 6'5" and an athetic freak I would be right their doing everything I could for an NBA team.  The humble difference here refers back to my first point on things I realized in watching the NBA Finals.  That is when you put your heart, commitment, dedication, and desire into something fully and without hesitation no matter the outcome you can walk away with your head held high and knowing you gave all you had.  This is the fundamental flaw I believe exists with NBA players these days.  The league is broken up into 40 or so great players making big money, 200 or so solid players trying to be great some day, and about another 200 or so that are just happy to get paid well to play a sport.  I mean no disrespect to any of the nearly 500 players playing in and around the NBA, I am simply amazed at the differences in life.  Lebron James's supposed failures this past year will somehow generate money for the NBA, and the Miami Heat.  The Heatles as they have been referred to will spend an offseason trying to figure out what went wrong, when all they really need to do is take a step back and look around.  See that is the part that is missed so much in the NBA now.  I learned a very important lesson from someone in my occupation who told me sometimes we are to close and need to step back to see everything around us.  When the urge is to make change or do something right away, we cannot do anything but step back.  I belive this applies to the Heat as well as any other NBA team currently in the leage.  We know the math which says out of 32 teams only 1 can win every year.   And we know that it takes heart, determination, dedication, commitment, few injuries, chemistry,  and an extreme amount of luck!  This also applies in life in general.  I like most americans in our country am struggling in the middle class line while trying to pay my mortgage, car payment, and all the other cost of living expenses.  The difference is the term million is no where in my vocabulary nor is it on the horizon.  I like to belive that if I had the opportunity to be a part of the NBA I would exhibit the traits I refered to above and show all my teammates what type of commitment we can give when we lay it all on the line.  This is the concept I have tried to live my life by and raise my children with.  It's ironic but I look at Lebron James, Chris Bosh, and Dwayne Wade as if they were children, and I wonder if they have ever been told they were not good enough.  Human nature tells us that we are not going to work hard to be better at anything if we are always told we are doing a great job.  If my wife never told me I forgot to do something, or something I did wasn't good, I would be content to always fail.  It seems corny, but I believe the best support and encouragement is my understanding what we are weak at and how to address it.  So for this first post I will wrap it up by leaving you with this:  If you want to win, be great, and succeed, then go get it by working hard, using all of your heart, be committed and dedicated to the improvement and most of all be humble!  Thank you for reading, and please leave me some comments and let me know if you liked what you read, hated it, or would like to hear more!