Since I was twelve years old
I have spent significant time in gymnasiums and workout rooms.

Still do.

Bouncing and shooting a leather ball towards
and hopefully through a metal rim,
running sprints,
lifting weights,
stretching,
showering and changing clothes…
doing it again the next day.

I still do it.

I have learned a great many lessons doing this…
about the balance of life.

Working hard is essential.

Hard work is hard.

It should be.

It yields great results.

Sometimes.

At other times it leads to progress but can result in failures during the process.

But the process leads
to lessons learned
and victories earned.

I thought what I was doing early on was hard work….
but I had yet to learn
how to work hard.

I thought I worked hard.
Sometimes we suffer
for a lack of understanding.

I did.

I learned later on that I worked hard at somethings…
but did not know how to work hard enough at others.

You can be hard at work
but not be working hard.

In college I learned more about working hard than I had before.

As I grew older I actually learned how to really work hard at getting better.

I won Letters and a few awards
and had some success ….
but had I known about
and how to really work hard
at getting better
in my early teenage years,
I would have been more successful as an athlete.

I was not as singularly focused on getting better as I could have been.

I actually got better as I got older
and learned what it took
not just to play…
or to work hard…

but to GET BETTER.

This all came to my mind
last Sunday, the 26th,
as I learned that
the hardest worker
I had heard about in athletics
died on the side of a mountain in Southern California.

He died making an effort to instill that same ethic in his daughter.

When I consider what effort he put into to his athletic career…. I realized I had never put that type of effort into mine.
I knew this after reading and learning over the years about his commitment and unending hours of workouts aimed at becoming what he eventually became.

One of a very few
who could be called “the greatest”.

One of his stated goals….
from all his physical and mental lessons learned….
was to be known
as an “over-achiever”.

Most great ones do not aspire to that humble title.

But he wanted to exhaust himself and max out all of his effort.

He did not fail.

He had astronomical success.

He was so successful he became internationally recognizable merely by his first name.

He sacrificed many things in his unending quest to succeed.

I do not believe I sacrificed enough things to be as singularly focused as this young man
with whom I share a birthday.

I share a birthday but never shared that singular focus toward the exclusion of so many other things for the goal before me.

Spiritually, I have sacrificed
a good many things….
for the goal set before me.

But…..I failed to do the same
for the athletic goals
I thought were important.

I do not know if his early death is premature….in the eternal view … I don’t believe anything is.

But these past 10 days I have felt
a weight in my spirit
because of the ending of his life.

Maybe it was the tragic aspect of it.

And his young age.

And that his young daughter was with him.

I never met him.

I had no personal interaction with him.

However,
I watched and followed him
for 24 years.

I traveled to and paid
to watch him play.

There was great joy derived from watching his successes as his team has been my team since I was 12.

There was great joy derived from his successes because I had aspired to some of those things as well.

I had aspired….
but never did I ever perspire
enough to achieve anything, anywhere near what he did.

After a severe and admitted mistake in 2003…..
which he called “adultery”,
and no one calls it that unless they are approaching it from a biblical sense….

I saw him recover,
work with his wife to save his marriage,
have three more daughters…

have a better second half to his career than the first…

and after having an almost unequaled career over 20 years….

he again worked exceptionally hard and won an OSCAR
from telling a story about his love for his sport in an animated movie.

Four years ago he walked away from a lot of what he could have done for himself

to work hard at being husband and father.

It was the latter at which he was doing when he and his daughter and seven others died on that hill in Calabasas.

I pray his soul is now with The One
Who sacrificed more than anyone ever has….
and won a greater victory than any one ever has.

It was said by the Priest at his Church that he came to Mass early on the 26th….

I pray he had given his life to the One he would have prayed to that morning.

As we try to take from
and learn from those around us
and those we watch…

from Kobe I derived great joy…

and I saw what devoted, consistent.
and persistent hard work does.

And even for a man my age….
I can still take steps forward…

from a lesson learned.