You searched for label/death

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a seer warns Julius to beware the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre Pompey, Caesar sees the same seer and calls jokingly to him, “see the Ides of March has come.”

“Aye, but not gone,” the seer whispers back to him as Julius strides to his death at the hands of the “Liberators,” a group of senators who stabbed him to death in an act of “tyrannicide.”

The Ides of March has truly come and gone in 2008, but we are in the middle of an annual American ritual where the warning to “beware” is particularly relevant. That’s right, we are at the halfway point of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. This is a time when even marginally interested basketball fans live up to the full expression of the abbreviated nickname “fan” and become … fanatics.

This particular tournament seems to deliver the “madness” each and every year as a David or two slays a Goliath or three. Just this year, San Diego toppled mighty Connecticut; West Virginia dispatched perennial power Duke–after Belmont, still fairly new to this Division I game missed a last second shot that would have knocked the Dukies out in the first round; and Davidson, led by a sophomore guard, Stephen Curry, who looks all of 16 years of age, stunned behemoth Georgetown.

So a note of simple caution to colossal Kansas, unbeatable UCLA, notorious North Carolina, mammoth Memphis, terrifying Texas, and any other “favorites” still playing in the tournament: beware March Madness. It has come. But it has not gone.

Who knows what liberators are out and about with tyrannicide on their minds?

On June 4, 2010, John Wooden died a the age of 99 in Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He was named by his peers as the greatest team sport coach in American sporting history. Humble, selfless, caring, he won 10 NCAA national championships – something he never talked about – as coach at UCLA.

He was a three-time All American at Purdue and won a national championship there as a player. He then coached high school and taught English for 11 years before entering the college ranks. During his tenure at UCLA, which began in 1948, he had four perfect seasons, had an 88-game winning streak, won 7 straight national championships, won 38 straight games in the NCAA tournament, was elected into the College Basketball Hall of Fame as both a coach and a player, and many other accomplishments.

But Wooden, a small-town country boy from Indiana never wavered in his values on the road to the bright lights of Tinseltown.

As a teacher, he began every basketball season by showing his players how to put their socks on the right way. He never talked to them about winning or losing; just living their lives with character. He designed a pyramid of success that he felt would make players victors not only on the court but in all of life. It included values like industriousness, loyalty, enthusiasm, initiative, alertness, poise, honesty, confidence, and other traits that were as much about being a good person as a good basketball player. As a coach, he didn’t bully, he didn’t cuss, he didn’t run the most sophisticated systems. “He was really more like a parent than a coach,” said Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The theme he spoke of most is love and the great love his life was Nellie, his wife of 53 years. She was his first love and the only girl he ever kissed. After her death, he would sit down on the 21st of each month and write her a love letter that he would then leave on her pillow. Sports columnist Rick Reilly often asked him if he could use the letters as the basis of a book they could write together on making love last. Even decades after her death Wooden, with tears running down his cheeks, would say it was too recent and he needed more time

The Wizard of Westwood was an icon for coaches who are themselves icons. His players speak of him reverentially. Bill Walton said that some of Coach Wooden’s quotes and sayings – Woodenisms – that he snickered at as a player are the words he has on his walls and has taught his own children.

Just a sample of Woodenisms that will endure beyond his death are:

Ability is a poor man’s wealth.

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.

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.

Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.

Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. Courage is what counts.

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.

It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

Material possessions, winning scores, and great reputations are meaningless in the eyes of the Lord, because He knows what we really are and that is all that matters.