Moments can define our lives.
Acceptance to college. Graduating. Our wedding. The death of a loved one. The birth of a child.
There are also moments that can define our professional lives. We earn a promotion. We conceive of an idea that catapults a company forward.
But there are also moments that can define our career in a negative way.
Kyle Tucker recently wrote an article about basketball coach John Calipari, who was one of the most successful collegiate basketball coaches in the country but then lost his way.
The article points to this one moment as an explanation for his reversal of fortune. A moment when Calipari decided to play it safe, rather than continuing the style that had made him and his team one of the most successful in college basketball.
Tucker wrote, “On April 4, 2015, John Calipari was the king of college basketball. He’d brought Kentucky to the Final Four for the fourth time in five years, this time with an unprecedented 38-0 record and a shot at not only his second national championship but also one of the greatest seasons of all time.
On April 5, 2015 in Indianapolis, his Wildcats led Wisconsin by four points with five minutes to go, seemingly destined for a title-game collision with Duke and nemesis Mike Krzyzewski. That is, until Calipari effectively deflated the basketball, ordering a team with seven eventual NBA draft picks to play stall ball. ‘I don’t like this. It ended up in a bad shot last time,’ legendary broadcaster Bill Raftery told the television audience, groaning as he watched plodding possessions that mostly ended in hurried, off-balance heaves. Calipari buried his face in his hands as the dream season disintegrated.
The next day, news broke that Calipari was voted into the Naismith Hall of Fame, so he stayed in Indianapolis to accept awkward congratulations. He sat before reporters, still shell-shocked from the night before, fielding alternating questions about his career’s most devastating loss and most prestigious honor. It was as if he’d slipped and fallen off Kilimanjaro just shy of the summit, only to somehow wake up atop Everest. ‘I feel phony,’ he said that day.
Kentucky and its coach have never quite been the same since. More than eight years later, Calipari and the Wildcats have not been back to a Final Four. They’ve won one NCAA Tournament game in the last three years. The mountaintop has faded from view.” That one game, say people who know Calipari, broke him.
There are of course moments when it is prudent to play it safe. But Caliper’s story is a reminder when you have the advantage, resources at your disposal, it’s time to press forward because if don’t you might lose momentum, and if you lose momentum, then your team can lose belief in itself and confidence can fade, and that can be hard, even for someone like John Calipari, to recapture and to re-ignite.
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