ANSON DORRANCE SPEECH TO UNC ATHLETES

I. There is a guy named Herb Greenberg who started a company called Caliper, through his
company he sells his services to the NHL, NFL, NBA and major league baseball.

A. What he is paid a lot of money to do is to analyze athletic potential and advise different professional teams who to draft.

B. His methodology is to have the athletes he is asked to analyze take a battery of psychological tests to see if the three most critical qualities for athletic success are a part of their make up.

C. If one or more of these qualities is not there he advises his clients not to draft the athletes being considered, not to take the risk.

II. There is nothing horribly profound or surprising about what he is searching for in his tests.

He is looking for the core of athletic character. He is looking for:

One . . . self-discipline
Two . . . competitive fire and
Three . . . self-belief

A. All the talent in the world can be torpedoed by any one or all three of these critical qualities if you are missing them.
B. All of you have choices to make that will sort out how good you are going to be . . . how you chase these three areas will be the final measure in your athletic greatness.

III. I am sure everyone in this room has huge talent. The University of North Carolina does not recruit athletes without it.

A. And some of you are going to make it because you have the self discipline to separate yourself from your peers even though self discipline is an extraordinarily uncomfortable state . . . it is not easy for ordinary people. Most of us are rather ordinary so most of us will not really attain their potential. It is just too hard to invest in being the best. Most of us would rather be comfortable. But please understand being ordinary is not an indictment it is a choice.

“The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching”.

B. Some of you will make a name for yourself and your university because your competitive fire lights up an arena or a stadium. Do you remember the day or the moment you decided you were always going to do your best?

C. Some of you will make a name for yourself because your self belief will not be shaken, regardless of what happens to you.

Heather O’Reilly – in overtime had a chance to take out Germany the team that beat us in the 2003 World Cup . . . she missed, she hit the post. . .

IV. I am here to tell you, you control all of these qualities. These are not genetic traits you
inherited, these are all decisions you all have made or can make now to make a difference.

V. I learned a wonderful lesson about choice from a math teacher (Dunleavy) I had when I was a sophomore in high school.

A. He said he was going to give us a homework assignment every day. It was going to be worth a percentage of our final grade in the class.

B. He said we could select to do the assignment or not. Then he showed us with percentages (after all this WAS a math class) how little our grade would be affected if we choose not to do it. He also said he would never get upset with us over not choosing to do our homework. Looking back it seems like he was actually “daring” us not to do it.

C. Then he said something wonderfully profound. He said he honestly could care less whether or not we did the homework but he did care about this: if we selected to so something else he wanted us to make sure that what we selected to do was more important to us than lowering our math grade that small percentage.

D. For a while all of us in that class except for the teacher’s pet, of course, periodically did something crazy that we pretended was our “more important” choice, hoping that he would ask us one day what we had selected to do rather than do our homework.

Bragging about our exploits we hoped would take us into boarding school legend but unfortunately for us, he never asked. In fact he never talked about this again. And to our disappointment not turning the homework in did not upset him in the least, just like he had promised.

E. I have never forgotten that extraordinary lesson from that obviously very wise man. He was the first person that treated me completely like an adult. In his very clever way he made me consciously accountable for my choices and never took a self righteous position on any choice I made but taught me in an extraordinarily powerful way that every choice has a consequence and I have lived my life accepting everything that has happened to me because in some way I have chosen it. He was the man that convinced me of this.

VI. So let me ask you, what are all of you going to choose to be? This core of athletic character is not what you have been given, it is what you choose to have.

So will you choose to have:
- self-discipline
- competitive fire and
- self-belief?

And if you don’t choose it, don’t worry, very few people do . . . these kinds of people are exceptionally rare, they are sometimes called champions. “Champion” is another word for individuals willing to do difficult and uncomfortable things on a daily basis that no one else is willing to do.