the best street sweeper

On Monday night, millions of us tuned in to watch college basketball’s championship game. It was time for the so-called madness of the month to come to an end.

The game, by most accounts, was excellent — one of the best championship games ever — well played by both teams. So well played that it was not decided until the final buzzer blew. It was one seemingly miraculous shot after the other — not just by the victor, but also by the runner up. Villanova and North Carolina each contributed to a great game; Villanova was simply one shot better.

With the continuous confetti and celebration, I wondered shortly thereafter how it would feel to be North Carolina… how heartbroken the team and their loyal fans must feel, being that talented, that close, but to fall to a single, last second shot. Is there any consolation in a great game played, absent only the win?

As Carolina coach Roy Williams said somberly in the quiet wake after the game, “What do you say to your kids?”

What do you say to the people who don’t win? Is playing well enough?

As a person who believes that sports are far more than a game — in the sense that it’s a phenomenal, fertile teaching ground — an avenue where so much, so quickly can be learned — I was struck learning about comments frequently articulated by the Villanova coaching staff. Borrowing from a speech Martin Luther King gave to junior high students in Philadelphia in 1967, head coach Jay Wright and company have continually encouraged their players to: “Be the best street sweeper you can be.”

The lengthier Dr. King quote is as follows:

“And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.”

Be the best street sweeper you can be.

In the pregnant pause before the final play of Monday night’s NCAA men’s championship game, senior Villanova Wildcat player Daniel Ochefu borrowed a young boy’s broom to mop up the floor himself, having just dove on the floor, generously sharing his perspiration. Ochefu would soon set a pick from that spot, freeing the ball-handler, who would provide the assist to the eventual shooter. Each man had to do his job well in order for the final play to happen. The key is doing your job well — and not attempting to do someone else’s. In other words, “if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo…” Do your job well.

Each of us needs to do “our job” well — whatever lot has fallen upon us. We tend, though, to spend significant time comparing our “lots,” so-to-speak; we exhaust ourselves — and our time and energy — by focusing more on the “lot” of another. We then “sweep” at a lesser level than our full potential.

So… “What do you say to your kids?”

What do you say to the people who don’t win but play phenomenally?

“You have done your job well, son. You have swept the streets well.”

Respectfully…
AR