Collective Character: UVA Basketball

I won’t be the only one to put pen to paper to discuss what the Virginia Cavaliers basketball team just pulled off in winning the 2019 National Championship.

The story, in many ways, was already written.

Before Diakite’s shot to send the Elite Eight game to overtime, before Guy’s three free throws to win the National Semifinal, and before Hunter hit that three to tie the game tonight, the narrative was already in place.

Sure, it’s more enjoyable to spend time discussing how the first #1 seed to ever lose to a #16 seed played their way not only back into contention, but to a place their program had never been.

Even if they lost, however, that still would have been true. UVA had never been to a National Championship game before tonight. And in a loss, the story would really still be the same. What this team accomplished wasn’t going to be defined with whether or not they cut down the nets in Minneapolis.

Because it isn’t about wins and losses for Tony Bennett. That’s not what defines success. At least not for people like him who understand what it really means to win.

I was always struck by a comment made by the late, great Jim Valvano in a speech he gave to the Million Dollar Round Table in the mid-80’s.

He said that “the relationship between hard work and success was not direct. It’s not if you work hard, you’re going to be successful. It’s if you don’t work hard, you’ve got no shot.”

Hard work doesn’t guarantee success. We can all point to plenty of people who have busted their tails only to come up short. But if you refuse to do the work in the first place, well then you’ve got no chance.

The success is just a product of the effort, and we don’t put forth the effort simply to see the success.

We put forth the effort because it’s all a part of the process of becoming who we want to be, of realizing our best selves, of achieving a life of sustained excellence.

If you become a person of great effort, and the reason you are focused on putting forth great effort is because you know it’s the only way to see true excellence in your own life, and in turn, help those around you realize true excellence in their lives, the results will take care of themselves.

The Virginia Cavaliers proved that not last night, but in everything they did the entire last year.

I heard Jim Nantz call this a “worst to first” moment, but in reality, it wasn’t that. They weren’t the worst team last year, far from it. They were the #1 overall seed after all.

The habits were already there.

They had already been developed and cultivated in the ten years since Tony Bennett took over the UVA program.

Studying character is kind of my life’s work. It’s what I’m passionate about.

The Greek word from which we derive our word character was used to describe the engraving of a coin.

When a coin is engraved, you take something that has form and shape, and you imprint upon it markings that identify to every single person that sees it what its value is.

Your character is the same way.

Your character is your indication to the rest of the world what your value is. It is the actions you take that tell everyone around you who you are and what you are worth.

It is something that doesn’t just show up in the big moments but is present in all of the moments.

Character is simply the sum of your moral habits, all of the little pieces of you that collectively showcase what you represent, and moral habits, just like any kind, require consistent action.

So, we don’t need to look at the UVA basketball team as just a feel-good story of redemption during their One Shining Moment. That would be misleading and a misrepresentation of the character of their program.

What we need to do is try and extract the values that led them to a place where after all they had been through, they were able to emerge from the other side one step closer to their ultimate goal.

And I don’t mean winning a National Championship.

I mean becoming the best versions of themselves that they could become. This is what the Greeks call Arete, it means the highest good of something, that place where it is most excellent.

Culture is a big-time buzzword in the leadership sphere right now, and I’m not saying developing it is easy by any means, but I think understanding what it is might actually be pretty simple.

If character is the sum of your habits, then for a team, its culture is nothing more than its collective character. It is the sum of all of the habits of all the individuals on the team. Becoming a person of character is a daily process, so becoming a team of character is exponentially more difficult.

But people like Tony Bennett understand that collective character is what drives an organization.

Collective character that is driven by purpose and rooted in love says that I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but that’s not really the point in the first place. What matters is that we each spend ourselves in a cause that is worthy of our best effort, and in doing so, we all work on calling each other up to our best selves each and every day.

One of my favorite speeches given by Teddy Roosevelt is titled “The Strenuous Life.”

This speech to me, sums up the last 12 months for the Virginia Cavaliers and is the real lesson that we should take away from their National Championship run.

Given in 1899 at the Hamilton Club in Chicago, future President Roosevelt said that “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. The life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

“We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

“We have a given problem to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it, but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain that we cannot possibly solve it.

“Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals.

“Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”

If the cause is worthy, then spend yourself in the worthy cause.

Get bloody.

Strive valiantly.

Fall short.

But dare greatly.

That to me represents the 2019 Virginia Cavaliers basketball team.

And, really, I think that’s the challenge for us all.

It’s funny because Tony Bennett said that before the game he played the song “Hills and Valleys” for the team, and they most definitely experienced a mountaintop moment tonight.

Mountaintops are important to the human race, after all.

If you are Jewish, you believe Moses received the Ten Commandments from a mountaintop.

If you are Christian, you believe Jesus gave his most famous sermon from a mountain.

If you are a follower of Islam, you believe Muhammad received his first revelation from on top of a mountain.

If you are Hindu, you believe Shiva abides on the top of a mountain.

We should all try and experience as many mountaintop moments as possible.

But here’s the thing: The mountaintop moments won’t sustain you during the grind in the game of life, because we don’t live our lives on the mountaintop.

We live, we work, we spend our time, and we operate out of the valley.

And in order to live in the valley, in order to survive the daily challenges that are thrown your way, we all must prepare ourselves with the habits necessary to face those challenges.

Our character is built in the valley.

And the collective character of the 2019 Virginia Cavaliers basketball team wasn’t built for the mountaintop, even if they found their way to the summit.

It was built so that they could sustain life in the valley.

It was built so that they could live the strenuous life.