Let’s follow yesterday’s negative blog about Will Smith’s Oscar outburst with something positive…

Coach Mike Krzyzewski ended his 42-year coaching stint at Duke Saturday night when arch-rival University of North Carolina won the NCAA semi-final game. The game was close throughout. 

As a Clemson guy, I tend to root for Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) teams in basketball, including UNC and Duke (Clemson rarely fields a decent basketball team). My youngest son, David, especially is a lifelong Duke fan since all three of my sons and I watched the famous Duke-Kentucky NCAA tournament game, March 28, 1992. David would have been 12 years old at the time. That game ended with “the shot” by Christian Laettner after a nearly full-court pass by Grant Hill. (The shot was great, but routine, in my opinion. It was “the pass” that made it possible!)

Duke went on to win the tournament, defeating Coach K’s former mentor, Indiana Coach Bobby Knight, in the semi-finals in Knight’s last final-four appearance. Ironically, the final score in Knight’s losing last final four appearance, 81 – 78, is remarkably close to the final score in Coach K’s losing last final four appearance, 81 – 77. I guess what goes around comes around!

The ESPN article on Coach K’s post-game interview summarizes his career:

In June, Krzyzewski announced that the 2021-22 season would be his last and assistant Jon Scheyer would replace him. With 1,202 wins, 13 ACC championships and five national titles, he is generally viewed as the greatest coach in college basketball history along with John Wooden, the legendary UCLA leader who won 10 national titles during a 12-year stretch.

In the interview, Coach K did not wish to talk about himself or his legacy, choosing instead to focus on the players. He did close with this poignant statement:

I’ll be fine. I’ve been blessed to be in the arena. And when you’re in the arena, you’re either going to come out feeling great or you’re going to feel agony, but you always will feel great about being in the arena. And I’m sure that’s the thing, when I look back, that I’ll miss. I won’t be in the arena anymore. But, damn, I was in the arena for a long time. And these kids made my last time in the arena an amazing one. – Coach Mike Krzyzewski, after his last game, April 2, 2022

“In the arena” reminds one of the famous Teddy Roosevelt paragraph in the middle of a speech called Citizenship in a Republic, delivered in Paris in 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. – Teddy Roosevelt, emphasis mine

Coach K reminds me to be “in the arena.” I’m in a situation right now where I’m tempted to criticize and walk away. But there are “no points” for being a critic.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. (James 1.22, ESV)

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. (1 Corinthians 9.24, ESV)

But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way… (Philippians 3.13 – 15, ESV)