“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” (John Wooden)
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the NBA’s all-time scoring leader and a few years ago he wrote a book entitled “Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-year friendship on and off the court”.
John Wooden was the legendary basketball coach at UCLA when Kareem (then known as Lew Alcindor) played there.
Kareem was a black kid from inner-city Philadelphia that converted to Islam. John Wooden was an old white guy from a small town in Indiana who was a protestant Christian.
You can’t get much farther apart when trying to label people or check boxes.
Yet, they had a connection that lasted well after the player-coach relationship ended and led Kareem to write a book 50 years later.
What’s that you say? You’d have a good relationship with a 7-foot stud like that if you were the coach. Hmmm, that’s not necessarily true.
Every day across the country, we butt heads with people we disagree with on some issue or another.
John Wooden connected with a player that was his polar opposite during the Vietnam war era (which happened to be a pretty troubling time in our nation’s history).
Understanding, learning about, and connecting with others can lead to mutual trust and respect.
We could probably all use a little bit of that right now.