1
It Begins with Humility
 
 
More than any play I drew up on the board in our locker room, more than any strategy or concept we used during our national championship season, one word paved the way for everything that would follow: humility.
This probably is not the way most books following a national championship begin. There are victories to talk about, stories to tell, and lessons to learn. Humility is not even a basketball word. You might ask, where does this guy, or any basketball coach, get off talking about humility? I agree that humility is scarce in the athletic world. Egos run rampant, as much on the sidelines as on the court. The egotistical coach, the arrogant athlete, they are stereotypes that too often ring true.
Here at the outset of this book, you should understand that there are two ways to handle subjects as a coach or teacher. You can teach people or try to help them from showing them how you succeeded, or you can allow them to see and learn from your failures. The former is much more fun. But the latter often is more instructive. In this book, I not only will talk about successes and how they came about, but failures, too, in the hope that both sides will be helpful for some; because we all come up short at some point.
I was not a picture of humility for much of my career. That is one reason I want to talk about it first. The other reason is this: Without humility, no other principle or lesson I talk about in this book will hit home. It is the key to everything that follows.
When our players came back to campus before school started for the 2012–13 season, I knew there was a great danger of becoming complacent or resting on the success of having made the Final Four the previous April. When we got the team together, the theme of my first discussion in our first meeting was humility. It was the theme of my first speech to our fan base during our annual Tipoff Luncheon in October. And it was the last word I wrote on the board after every victory through our entire season, right through the NCAA championship game. For our team, humility was the key to staying focused and to keeping a winning mind-set, as well as the key to accepting setbacks and turning them to positives. Most of our players embraced the lesson of humility, which is a remarkable thing for a group of young people.
It was more than the key for our players. It was the key for me. The longer I live and the more I experience, the more I believe that humility is the quality essential to sustained success, and a lack of it is the major stumbling block for those who find success for a time, then lose it. I’m not claiming to have perfected the trait, but I have learned its importance, and am learning to let it take root in my life and work. The lesson of humility comes to everyone eventually. Either you learn its value, or life drills it into you—and life can be a painful teacher. It is a lesson best learned before life makes you another case study. Let me give you an example: myself.
We all have our share of personal regrets. My greatest professional regret might surprise you. It wasn’t leaving the University of Kentucky and walking into my first professional failure with the Boston Celtics. Failure is not final, and I always have said it is fertilizer for future success. No, my great regret from a professional standpoint is that I was not humbler at an earlier age. Here is how it worked for me. My early coaching career was a succession of surprising rebuilding jobs, each more celebrated than the one before. My first head coaching job was at Boston University. The team had won seventeen games combined in the two years before I arrived and hadn’t had a winning season in fifteen years. Within five years we had made the NCAA Tournament. After working as an assistant coach to Hubie Brown for the New York Knicks, I took over as head coach at Providence College, which had just finished a 12–20 season. In my second season, we went to a Final Four. The next season I had a dream job, head coach of the New York Knicks. For a kid who grew up just eight blocks from Madison Square Garden, at 26th Street, it was as much as I could ask for. They’d won just twenty-four games the year before. In my second season, we won the franchise’s first Eastern Division championship in nearly two decades.
From there it was on to the Roman Empire of college basketball, the University of Kentucky. We took a program famously crippled by NCAA probation and were back in the Final Four in four years, and won a national title in six. Professionally, everything I touched seemed to be turning into gold.
Over the course of that time, I developed a feeling that much of that success was about me and what I was doing. It was difficult not to feel that way. There’s no question when you coach at Kentucky, you fall into a trap of thinking you’re much better than you really are, because of the adulation and attention. It is constant and seems to come in a never-ending supply. I did not know it in the midst of it, but that arrogance, that thinking of yourself as the best, is one of the biggest reasons successful people stumble and fail. It helped lead me into an error, but it was a fortunate one.
I was very lucky to have left that atmosphere when I did. I look back at my time at Kentucky and realize I didn’t carry myself with the humility necessary to foster more lasting relationships. Thankfully, I was able to build some with several remarkable people, anyway, that remain to this day. Because I left when I did, after being on top for some great years, I had a good ending. Most Kentucky coaches have not. Adolph Rupp didn’t; he was in a fierce battle to keep coaching. Joe B. Hall retired under fire despite winning a national title and reaching three Final Fours. Eddie Sutton left in turmoil. Tubby Smith never got his just credit for the outstanding job he did. His major problem was winning the championship too soon. So for me, leaving Kentucky personally wasn’t a bad thing. I recognized that I was falling into a trap with all that adulation; but I really didn’t understand completely the consequences until I failed with the Celtics. If I hadn’t left, I might not have learned that important lesson of humility. Instead, the experience taught me a great deal and I emerged from my time in Boston with the knowledge that I needed to live my life more humbly. I retained that knowledge, but from time to time I would forget it, or not put it into practice, much to my dismay and detriment, which I will discuss during this book.
The consequences of not learning humility can be tragic. If we don’t always see these consequences in our own lives, we should be able to recognize them all around us. Not learning humility is, for one thing, an expensive lesson. In 2009, Sports Illustrated estimated that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years after their playing careers are over, and 78 percent of NFL players are facing serious financial distress just two years after their retirement. Others might tell you it’s a lack of discipline or poor financial advice that brings this about. I’m convinced that more than anything else, in most of these cases, it’s a deficit of humility.
Look at the headlines to see examples of people with great talent who fail in many ways. What usually isn’t in the headlines or the stories is the root cause of their failure. People could see it coming...