What You're Made for: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports - Hardcover

Raveling, George; Holiday, Ryan

 
9780593852972: What You're Made for: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593852974 ISBN 13: 9780593852972
Verlag: Portfolio, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

"I'm proud to call George a mentor and a friend." --Michael Jordan

Orphaned at just thirteen in a still-segregated Washington, D.C., George Raveling was introduced to a relatively unpopular sport--basketball--in high school. The rest, as they say, is history. Raveling went on to become one of the winningest coaches of all time, a mentor to legendary athletes, and a confidant of the sport's greatest coaches, including Bob Knight and John Wooden. He convinced Michael Jordan to collaborate with Nike on the Air Jordan. He led the 1984 U.S. men's Olympic team to their ninth gold medal. He even once owned the original, handwritten copy of Dr. King's most famous speech after an unlikely stint as a bodyguard during the famous March on Washington.

Here, Coach Raveling tells the story of his extraordinary ascent, sharing incredible behind-the-scenes stories of his days working with the best in the game. But this book is more than a memoir--it's a manual for life that presents surprising methods for harnessing your potential from a man who shaped the careers of so many legends. Raveling imparts lessons learned from his grandmother, his long career in basketball, and his lifelong habit of reading--to which he credits all his success.

Whether you're an athlete, a leader, a parent, a student, or simply seeking to mold your raw talent into greatness, What You're Made For is a blueprint for your life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George Raveling, known to many as "Coach," has transcended the intersections of sports, business, and culture. Following a standout college basketball career at Villanova University, he ascended to head coaching positions at Washington State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Southern California. After retiring from coaching, Raveling joined Nike at the request of Phil Knight. His achievements include induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. His books, including The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, and The Daily Stoic, appear in more than forty languages and have sold over ten million copies. He is a longtime friend and admirer of Coach Raveling and is honored to help him tell his story.

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To Be a Trailblazer

Faith is taking the first step even
when you don't see the whole staircase.

-Martin Luther King Jr.

After my mom was institutionalized, nobody knew what to do with me.

My grandma-as I said, we called her "Dear"-had five jobs at the time, and one of them was working for this white family in Georgetown. She cleaned the house, made meals, baked, and all that stuff. One day Dear told the lady of the house about my mom and how she was trying to figure out what to do.

"Maybe Catherine can help," the woman suggested.

Catherine, it turned out, was the head of one of the branches of Catholic Charities. She was able to get Catholic Charities to pay to send me to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. It was a school for boys from broken homes called St. Michael's.

St. Michael's was founded in 1916 by Bishop Michael J. Hoban. He wanted to do more than feed and house boys without homes; he wanted to educate them and teach them practical skills they could use to make a living.

The boarding school sat on four hundred acres. Surrounded by woods and fields, it was the opposite of urban D.C. in every way, and there was plenty to do. When I woke up in the morning, it wasn't the clanging of street cars or vendors I heard, it was roosters. Here, the nuns and priests did the teaching and the students did the chores. I cleaned coops, baled hay, picked apples, scrubbed floors. I did whatever they asked me. I was just happy to be somewhere other than that little apartment.

Why did they pick me out of all the charity cases? I'll never know. Maybe they saw something in me. Maybe it was just luck, just a random act of kindness. In life, it doesn't really matter why you get an opportunity, only what you do with it.

I decided I wouldn't let this one pass me by.

It was here that I met Jerome Nadine, who would become a pivotal figure in my life. He was a trailblazer. He had been at St. Michael's before me, and as a Black student and basketball player, he had paved the way for someone like me. And after his time at the school, he'd been called to the priesthood, but his success and achievements in sports gave him credibility, and he used that to advocate for me.

Jerome kept pushing me to play basketball, mainly because I was so tall and a decent athlete. The basketball team, Father Nadine told me, travels all over the state to play games. I was looking for a way to occasionally get off campus for a little while and see the wider world, so I started wanting to play basketball. But I wasn't any good. Miraculously, I made the varsity team as a freshman. Years later, I found out that Jerome went to the basketball coach, Gene Vilela, and said, "Hey, I think George is going to be really a good basketball player. Don't cut him. Keep him on the team. He's not ready right now, but keep him on the team."

How did he know? Again, what did he see in me? I have no idea, but to that request I owe the rest of my life. Gene promised to keep me on the team, and each year I got better and better.

But basketball was just part of the story. At St. Michael's, I found myself surrounded by a group of nuns who invested an enormous amount of time in me as a person and a student. Most of them couldn't tell you the rules of basketball, but they saw potential in me and set about helping me realize something I didn't even know existed.

There was one nun in particular, Sister Delora, who took a special interest in my basketball development. She'd get the keys to the gym, come and get me, and I'd shoot for an hour under her watchful eye. It was through the dedication of people like Sister Delora and Father Nadine that I began to believe I could become something.

It was also at St. Michael's that I converted to Catholicism, and Jerome became my godfather. This wasn't just a formal title; it represented a deep spiritual and personal connection that would last a lifetime. Father Nadine went on to serve as a chaplain at various military institutions. I visited him in San Diego a couple of months before he passed away, a final meeting with the man who had been such a crucial part of my journey. You don't have to believe in God, but there is such thing as angels in this world-people like Father Nadine are the real thing.

By my senior year, all this support and hard work paid off. I became the leading scorer in the state, somewhat of a spectacle. People filled the gym to watch me play, and college coaches started to take notice. After a game in which I scored thirty points and something like twenty rebounds against St. Rose of Carbondale, I walked out of the locker room, and as I was walking to the team bus, I heard someone say, "George!"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"My name is Jack Ramsay," he said, handing me his card. "I'm the head coach at Saint Joe's College in Philadelphia. We've been following you. We're planning to offer you a scholarship, and I just wanted to introduce myself because you're going to see me at a lot of games this season."

He shook my hand and told me, "Keep playing good." I'll never forget that. It was so simple: Keep playing good.

Simple isn't the same as easy, but it was worthy of a motto, one I would try to follow the rest of my life.

When I got on the bus, my coach asked me who I was talking to. I handed him the card, and once he looked at the name, immediately, my coach's demeanor changed.

"What did he say to you?" my coach asked.

"He said he's been watching me play and he's going to offer me a scholarship," I said.

Coach gave me a knowing nod and I had the sense that he was proud of me.

So I said, "Coach, let me ask you something."

"Sure," he said.

"What's a scholarship?"

I had no idea. I had no idea that a school would pay for your education, and in return, you play on their basketball team.

I was pretty excited to tell Dear, and I assumed she'd be excited and proud. It turns out, she was even more in the dark than I'd been. "I thought I raised you better than that," she said after I gave her the news.

"What do you mean?" I said. "I think you've done a great job in raising me." She had. There wasn't a day that went by that I hadn't done my best to live up to her example and tried to follow what she had taught me.

"Well, I'm disappointed in myself because I can't believe that you're naive enough to think that some white people are gonna pay for you to go to college just so you can play basketball," she told me. "It makes no sense. They're tricking you."

I couldn't help but laugh, but I also understood her skepticism. Given what she had experienced, Dear had every reason to be wary. Her reaction was a powerful reminder of how our past experiences can shape-and sometimes limit-our perception of future opportunities.

In many ways, Dear was a product of her history. She had survived hard years without experiencing much generosity or selflessness from white people. Even though my schooling up to that point had already been taken care of by a charity, it just didn't make sense to her that sports could be a way into higher education, let alone a free one!

Civil rights activist and author James Baldwin would talk about how we carry history with us; in fact, we're unconsciously controlled by it. Dear's reaction was a living example of this truth. Her history-our history-was present in that moment, shaping her interpretation of what seemed to me like an incredible opportunity. It was just beyond her comprehension-and to be honest, it was barely within mine. The idea that playing a game could open the door to a college education seemed almost too good to be true. But sometimes, the path forward requires us to see beyond the limitations of our past experiences, to imagine possibilities that our history might tell us are...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593852974
ISBN 13 
9780593852972
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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