Every champion, like the eliminated Milwaukee star, knows they have to look at losses as a way to learn
Milwaukee has just lost game 5 and therefore the train for the semifinal of the NBA basketball conference. After the game, Giannis Antetokounmpo puts his face on it.
He was a candidate for the MVP title, his Bucks had been the best team in the regular season. Instead, they lost to the Miami Heat (who will now face New York). A defeat so surprising that a reporter asked a question, a legitimate one, which was an assist for a spectacular answer from Giannis. A lesson in sportsmanship that deserves to be seen and reviewed by all the kids who dream of a future as heroes. Yes, because the greatness of a champion is measured more by how he reacts to a defeat than by how he experiences the ecstasy of success.
THE QUESTION
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The Greek from Milwaukee was asked if the Bucks’ season should be considered a failure… And Giannis replied that “the word failure doesn’t exist in sport. There are good days and bad days. There are days when you win and others in which the opponents win, but everything is a step towards another success, because in sport there is always another step to take”. Antetokounmpo at one point asked a sacred monster for help: “What do you think of Michael Jordan who played for 15 years and won 6 rings? Do you want to tell me that his other 9 seasons have been a failure?”.
KEY
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No quote could have been more apt, because Michael Jordan, the greatest ever, said: “In my career I have missed more than 900 shots, I have lost almost 300 games, twenty-six times my teammates entrusted me with the decisive shot and I did it wrong. I failed many times. And that’s why I won it all in the end.” This last step is the key to everything. Failure, even in sport, exists, but it shouldn’t be considered as such. In a world made up of times and rankings, failing a goal against an opponent who turned out to be stronger that day happens. But it is only a defeat. And often, it can become the best way to rebuild or find your way back to success. Nelson Mandela, someone who understood so much about life, he said. “I never lose, or win, or learn.”
NO FEAR
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The truth is that an athlete, like a team, like a coach, must know how to look into defeat without fear. Otherwise he will never learn. Pioli’s Milan from the Scudetto a year ago was reborn like the phoenix after the 5-0 win against Atalanta in December 2019. Franco Ballerini, exactly 30 years ago, lost the Paris-Roubaix in the photo finish from Duclos Lassalle. He thought he had won and would have liked to dedicate it to his father who had recently passed away. He had failed a goal, against a stronger opponent (that day). But he managed not to consider it a failure because he had given his best. Ballerini trained and prepared, in detail, even more until he won two legendary editions of Roubaix in 1995 and ’98. Dancers, like Pioli, like Mandela, Jordan and Antetokounmpo have followed the advice of Charlie Brown, a giant of Western thought, who has always maintained: “Winning is not everything. Losing is nothing…”.
April 28 – 10:03
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