Sometimes just finishing is the achievement

Back in the 1970s, when dinosaurs roamed the land, I coached basketball in an inner-city league in Nashville, Tenn.

Inspired by “The White Shadow” television show at the time, the Black teenagers on my team named themselves the Shadows because I was the only white coach in the league.

We lost every game that season. Even though we had a standout team captain who worked the post and led the team with natural skills, a guy we all called J.C., we just couldn’t pull off a single win.

Of course, we didn’t lose because I was white.

Maybe “white guys can’t jump,” as the old movie suggests, but clearly other white guys can coach.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t me. My knowledge of and experience with the game fell considerably short of the urban style of ball I found myself in the middle of. I was seriously under-qualified for the job.

But that didn’t stop me from trying, and despite our season-long position in the cellar, just about every player on our team stuck it out to the end.

In other words, we finished.

Maybe I learned about the value of finishing from my foster brother, David Driver, who just a few years earlier took more than five hours to finish a marathon. He was so determined to finish that, even after making a wrong turn on the mountaintop course he was running, he turned around, got back on course and kept going, adding miles to his run.

He came in dead last, but he finished. It was a feat of sheer determination that got him across that finish line.

My own athletic career — consisting mostly of a little football and a lot of running — was by no means stellar. Occasionally I won something, or was part of a team that came out on top, but those weren’t my real accomplishments.

Mostly, I finished.

In football, I stuck it out through two-a-days, when the heat and humidity of an Arkansas August made the sweat pour from our bodies and the coaches gave us salt pills to keep us from cramping up. At that time in my life, it was the hardest physical challenge I had ever endured, but I worked hard and made it through the season.

And when I was 19, I too ran a marathon. The 26-mile course pounded on my ankles so badly that I had to borrow some crutches to get around for a couple of days afterward. But it didn’t matter, because I finished.

Of course, there have been many times when I didn’t finish. Sometimes I quit, and even if I was justified in doing so, I’m not proud of those times. I’m proud of the times I finished.

My brother David Driver died several years ago of a bad liver — on the operating table, still hoping to live another day. He was no quitter. He gave our family a glimpse of what determination, even in the face of death, looks like.

And a couple years after the Shadows finished our season, an old friend told me that J.C. had been killed in the South Nashville projects where he lived. Seems that he was taking up for a kid who was being picked on when someone pulled a gun and shot him down.

Sometimes losing is unavoidable, and we can only give it our best shot — and finish, one way or the other.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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