The Daily Stoic - George Raveling on Defying The Odds and Changing The Game of Basketball Forever (PT. 1)

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Ryan Holiday sits down with one of his greatest inspirations, the legendary George Raveling, a pioneer in basketball, civil rights, and leadership. From his childhood in segregated Washington, D.C., to becoming one of the most influential figures in sports history, George’s journey is nothing short of extraordinary. In this PT. 1 episode, George shares remarkable stories from his life, including his encounters with Presidents Jimmy Carter, Harry S. Truman, and Gerald Ford, his groundbreaking role as Nike’s Global Director of Basketball, and how his lifelong journaling practice has shaped his wisdom and perspective.As one of the most revered basketball coaches of all time, George has mentored legendary athletes and worked alongside coaching icons like Bob Knight and John Wooden. He played a pivotal role in persuading Michael Jordan to collaborate with Nike on Air Jordan, guided the 1984 U.S. men’s Olympic team to gold, and even became the unexpected guardian of the original, handwritten copy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech📕 You can grab copies of What You’re Made For signed by George Raveling and Ryan Holiday at The Painted Porch. Sign up for George Raveling and Michael Lombardi’s Daily Newsletter, The Daily Coach: https://www.thedaily.coach/Follow George on Instagram, X, and YouTube: @GeorgeRaveling  Connect with George on his website: https://coachgeorgeraveling.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Usually when I travel, I'm staying in an Airbnb. That is when I'm bringing my kids. We make a whole experience of it. And usually what I do is I pull up Airbnb, I look at guest favorites, I type in, okay, we want this many rooms, this many bathrooms, we want a pool, we want a washer and dryer, whatever it is. And you can find an awesome place to stay in.

And I've been doing it now, crazy me, at least 15 years I've been staying in Airbnbs, basically since it came out. I love Airbnb and you should check it out for your next trip. Oil and natural gas is an irreplaceable part of Canada's national economic prosperity. Global demand is growing and numerous countries have been asking for Canadian-made energy exports.

It's time for a new approach that brings Canadians together in support of our locally made energy, mining, food and forestry. It's time to build pipelines, power lines, railroads and ports so we can take control of our economic future. A message from Canada Action Coalition. Visit secureourprosperity.ca to learn more. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed

to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. So when I was in New York in 2016 for the launch of Ego is the Enemy, I was being interviewed by the New York Times for a piece they were doing. And then I said, okay, look, this is weird, but I have to go upstairs and sign a bunch of books. And she was like, why? And I was like, I was here for the launch

and I just got this email from my friend, George Raveling, who I didn't know super well then. I'd just met him a couple months earlier at a UT basketball practice. He heard I was gonna be in New York and let me know he's being inducted into the basketball hall of fame and there was gonna be a big dinner.

And he got to choose a book, and the book he wrote in the 1960s, 70s, about rebounding didn't seem like a good pick. Usually the coaches just give out copies of their book, and they were saying, "'Coach would like to give out your new book, "'Ego is the Enemy. "'Would you go sign 500 copies of it?'

And I was just like, yeah. And then they said, "'Also, would you like to come to the dinner?' So I had to rush out and get a suit after, but I went up there, signed the enemy, would you go sign 500 copies of it? And I was just like, yeah. And then they said, also, would you like to come to the dinner? So I had to rush out and get a suit after, but I went up there, signed the books, and then the next night I was there while George was inducted to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

I much deserved honor at Capstone in an incredible life that spans basically the integration of the sport of basketball. He was one of the first black players at Villanova. He plays with and against Jerry West, becomes the NBA logo. First black coach at basically every school he coaches. Iowa, Villanova, Washington, USC.

He's friends with John Wooden. He brings Jordan to Nike, runs international basketball at Nike, brings Novitski and Yao Ming to America. This is an incredible force in the game of basketball, but also in civil rights and also in American culture. And so to flash forward now, basically 10 years later, I get to tell you that George has a book

that he couldn't give out at the dinner, but now he can. And I feel very proud to have got to bring that to the world. His son Mark messaged me and said, hey, my dad just wondered if anyone might be interested if he had an idea for a book. And I said, I think so. I called my publisher and like a few days later, it was in the works.

And that book, What You're Made For came from, you know, originally wanted to do a memoir, but George just texted me this picture and it was like a page in a note card or something and it just said like, what am I made for? And then he was like listing these bullets. She was just like a journaling exercise. I was like, George, that has to be the book.

And well, here it is. It is the book, What You're Made For, Lessons From George's Incredible Life in Sports. I played a small part in bringing it into existence, but mostly I did that selfishly. Like I just wanted to spend extra time with him, which I did basically every week for the last year or so. And now it's out.

He and I signed copies. We're selling them at the Pain and Porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. The book is out now. I love this guy and I think you're gonna love him too. And I can't wait for you to check it out. Grab copies of what you're made for, signed by George and I from The Painted Porch.

I'll link to that in today's show notes. You can follow his daily email, The Daily Coach, which he does with Michael Lombardi, who helped bring my books into professional sports. And then you can follow George on social media. Just a wonderful person who has enriched my life so much, and I'm so excited to help bring him to you. You know, I think about it on a pretty regular basis, to help bring him to you.

You know, I think about it on a pretty regular basis, how glad I am that I took Shaka Smart up on his invitation to come to practice that one day. That was one of the best introduction gifts. I tell them all the time, the greatest gift you ever gave me was an introduction to Ryan Holiday. And it was the thrill of a lifetime. I'd read your books. And I remember when Shaka called me and he said, Coach, have you ever heard of the author Ryan

Holiday? And I said, no. And he said, well, I'm reading one of his books now and I bought an extra one for you. I think it's right down your alley." And so we met and we talked about you and then he set up the arrangement for us. He asked me, he said, Hey, would you be interested in meeting him? Because I was coming down to do a staff retreat for him. And he asked me, would I be interested in meeting you? I said, Absolutely. And so then, of course, we set up the dinner, and little did I know that it was going to end up being one of the best things that's ever happened to me in my lifetime. I've always been a person who believed that you have to have mentors, and not all of your mentors

have to be adults. And I also said to myself, I need to get four or five really young dudes to be my mentors. And you were one that came immediately to mind. I thought there was so much that I could learn from you. You lived a fascinating life yourself for a young man, I guess I would say, based on me being 87. But I've learned so much about writing a book, publishing a book. One of the conclusions I definitely came to, it's a lot harder to get the book published than it is to write it. And it's been an absolute lifetime reward to have a relationship with you, to learn from you, the meetings that we have by phone and on a weekly basis when we were putting together the structure for the book, every one of

those were an instrument and the best utilization of time. I told my wife after the second time we had those Friday morning calls, I said one thing about Ryan, if he says an aisle, it's going to be an hour, and we're going to impact as much as we could. And so it made me realize the value of your time and my time. Here's an opportunity to be with someone you really admire and respect, and you've got their attention for one hour. That's 60 minutes and get as much out of it as we can each time. And I wrote tons of notes to help me articulate the different points to you.

And little did I know that we would end up doing a book together. I know. It's like you get invited to do stuff, and you never know how your life is going to change from it. I thought I was just going to watch Texas do their basketball practice. And he said, there's gonna be this guy there I want you to meet. He said, he's the godfather of college basketball.

That's what we call him. And I was like, okay. And I feel grateful every day that that happened because you've been such a big part of my life. You've taught me so much. And I feel like doing the book too. Like I was thinking throughout it, like whether the book happens or not,

that I get an excuse to talk to George Raveling for an hour or so a week, that's a win unto itself. And it was an opportunity for me to revisit my life. I had never really sat down for any meaningful amount of time and thought about the journey from being born in a segregated hospital in Washington, DC in 1937 to 2025. It was a long journey, and I had never really stopped to think about much of the journey along the way. I didn't appreciate a lot of it. I was always in the go-go mood.

And once I had an opportunity to share my journey with you, things took on a more valuable positioning in my life. I learned to look at some of the things that I took for granted and realize how lucky I was to survive some of these situations along the way. Yeah, I can't imagine when you were born you could have even conceived of the year 2025 existing let alone that you would be around like that would have been so incomprehensibly far in the distance. Yeah, what's interesting is that in 1937, I was born at Garfield Hospital, which is

a segregated hospital. The whites had the top four floors above the ground, and you had to go around to the basement if you were black to get treatment. And at that time, the life expectancy of a black male in the United States was 44 years. And now if you go and you look at the life expectancy of an 87 year old black man, it's 77%. So I beat the odds on both of them. Yeah, although speaking of mentors, do you remember that time we went and spent an afternoon

with somebody who was older than both of us? You came out to Austin and we sat in Richard Overton's house. Oh yes. He was 112. That was one of the great experiences of my lifetime. Me too. To sit there and here's this guy, was he about 106 at the time?

I think he was 110 or 111. Yeah, and I can still see us driving up to his front of his house and he's sitting up there on the porch in a rocking chair and he's got a smoke and a cigar and that. And once he started to talk about his life, I just froze. I couldn't imagine that he was still such a vibrant individual, had a marvelous story to tell. I think he was 30 when you were born. Wow. That was a great afternoon we spent sitting

there learning all about his career and the Army and all the different things that he had done in the community. And that was a priceless opportunity there. As the years move forward, I realized and appreciated more than ever what he had done with his life. Yeah, yeah, you realize like he went and fought for a country. I mean, as did you, that, you know, treated him as a second-class citizen. And so when you can kind of wrap your head... Sometimes it feels like society isn't making progress. We feel like things aren't the way they should be,

which they're not. But then when you can see over the course of one person's life, the change. That's one of my favorite parts of the book, isn't making progress, we feel like things aren't the way they should be, which they're not. But then when you can see over the course of one person's life, the change. That's one of my favorite parts of the book where you're sort of listing some of the things that happened in the course of your life, whether it's wars that happened,

natural disasters that happened, things that were invented. I mean, you, as a little boy, you sat out the window and watched the streetcar go by, and then here we are in 2025. Just the arc of that's amazing to me. It was a time when, you know, people said, well, did you ever dream about being a basketball coach? And honestly, in those days,

black people didn't have the luxury to dream. Every day was about survival. And so I never dreamed about being a coach, black people didn't have the luxury to dream. Every day was about survival. So I never dreamed about being a coach, to being a player, any of those things. Every day I'd sit there and I'd watch the streetcars go by, people getting on and off the streetcars. And I even started to write down the number that was on the side of the streetcar, and then I wait for it to get down to the end of the line and come back. I didn't really have much of what one would call an exciting life growing up as a young person.

I was very fortunate to have people around me that kept me focused on the right things. Well, I can imagine you probably didn't dream of being a basketball coach when you were a kid because basketball was kind of a new game. Yes. Like it's not like people have been playing it for a 100 years. Like a kid now who picks up a basketball, there's a long rich tradition of which you are a part,

but it was the newest sport, right? Yeah, and the black community, when I was growing up, the two sports were baseball and boxing. Boxing was huge in the black community. Then they had this thing, Gillette had these Friday night fights, and we'd sit around the table with the radio sitting in the middle of the table. And we'd listen to Joe Louis fight or it was the treated a week for me as a youngster was to be able to sit and listen to the Friday night fights and that and of course baseball at that time I didn't know anything about the Negro leagues but I didn't follow baseball because there were black players on it. Yeah, well, I was thinking about this book,

which came together because your son, Mark, suggested it, which I'm eternally grateful for. But I think for people who don't know, this is your second book, and actually someone even more interesting suggested that book. Yeah, well, the first book that I really did was called War on the Boards, and it was a book on the fundamentals of rebounding.

I had a long-standing relationship with Bob Knight from back in the late 70s forward. We were having a conversation one day, Bob and I, and he said to me, he says, you know, George, if you're going to last in this profession, you've got to make, do something special and be something special. And so about a week went by and he called me and he said, make yourself an expert in rebound. And he said, you led the country and rebound and as a junior and a senior. So you've got the background for it. He said, I checked the country in Rebounding as a junior and a senior, so you've got the background for it.

He said, I checked with the Library of Congress, there's never been a book ever written on Rebounding. So then I went to work on putting together the book. The title war on the board is actually a friend of mine, Mary Arnold, was the one who gave me the title for the book. And so over the years, I've sold over a million copies of that book at clinics and bookstores. People, even to this day, people still ask me, hey, do you have a copy of War on the Boards? And so it ended up being a bestseller for me over the course of a long period of time. Yeah, and your interest in rebounding,

it was a similar thing to that advice from Bobby Knight, which is, I remember you telling me that you felt like if you could get rebounds, you'd get playing time. Yeah. Which is, I think there's a lesson there for young people, which is find something that adds value that you can specialize in that other people are neglecting.

Right, I felt that if I could lead the team in rebounding, I would get a lot of playing time because possession of the basketball is paramount. And so I started to put more emphasis on rebounding than on scoring or in defense. And I would set a goal for my game. Before the game, I want to get 15 rebounds or so forth. And so over the course of time, I started to realize about positioning to get the ball.

As soon as the shot is leaving the hand, that's my key to react and try to get myself in a position to rebound the ball. And I've always felt that if you're the best rebounder on the team or you're the best defender, you're going to get playing time. The coach is going to play his best defender. He's going to play his best rebounder. And so that was my way of creating value to stay on the floor as a basketball player. Now in high school, I scored a lot of points. But at that time, I was really just starting to

realize that I had some unusual talent in basketball. And so I realized that I could probably do well in the game if I was the best rebounder. And so I started to make that my identification as a player, to be the best rebounder in the game, to be the best rebounder in the country. And I had one game, which is still hard for me to believe. I had one game in college. I had 35 rebounds in the game. So you can imagine, there must've been a lot of bad shots in those days.

But I continued to really love the game, understand that there's a unique role for someone of my ability. And so by the time I was a senior at Villanova, I had worked myself up to where I was the leading rebounder in the country. And we also finished in the top 25 in the poll. So I felt like that I might not have been the best scorer,

might not have been the best shooter, but I was the best rebounder and that was something that I felt like I could do to earn my way on the floor. You just realized your business needed to hire someone like yesterday. With Indeed, there's no need to stress. You can find amazing candidates fast using sponsored jobs. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster.

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indeed.com slash wonder ECA. Just go to indeed.com slash wonder ECA right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash wonder ECA terms and conditions apply hiring Indeed is all you need When boxer muhammad ali refused to fight in the vietnam war citing his faith as a member of the nation of islam His decision sparked a firestorm and cost him his heavyweight title.

But Ali refused to back down, setting the stage for one of the most high profile legal battles of the 1960s. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud.

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and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. One of the funniest stories you told me was that both you and your grandmother didn't believe it when someone came and said, Hey, we want to offer you a college scholarship to play basketball, but I can imagine by the time you're the leading rebounder in the country, it started to make a little bit more sense

to you. You got what they had seen in you, and you got the exchange in value there that made sense to you. It wasn't just playing time, but oh, you see I'm paying my way by jumping for these balls that other players aren't going for. It was a way of taking advantage of this unique situation because of the fact

that I was a good rebounder and a high school scorer, I was able to get a scholarship, which at that time I had no idea what a scholarship was. We were playing this team St. Rose of Carbondale, and I was at St. Michael's at that time. And after the game, I come out of the locker room and there's a gentleman comes up to me and he hands me his business card. He says, Hi, my name is Jack Ramsey. I'm the coach at St. Joe's, and we're really interested in you now and offering you a scholarship and that. In those days, as a young person, you were taught to be seen and not talk. So I just listened and then he said, we're going to continue to come to your games and we're going to offer you a scholarship.

So when we got on a bus to go back to the school, my high school coach said to me, who was that guy you were talking to? And I showed him the card and he said, what did he say? I said, he told me that he's been following me and that he's going to offer me a scholarship to St. Joe's. And he said, he did? I said, yeah. And I said, coach, what's a scholarship? And I had no idea that you could have your education paid for, in turn, for doing your best in a particular sport, which was basketball. And so when I told my grandma about the scholarship, she couldn't comprehend the thing at all. And when I was telling her what had happened, she was very silent. I

says, dear, we called her dear. I said, dear, why are you so quiet? She says, oh, I kind of feel like I failed you somewhere along the line. And I said, no, what are you talking about? And she says, there's no white school going to give you a scholarship for four years to play basketball. It's the dumbest damn thing I ever heard. Why would somebody, they said, the schools are segregated, we were never taught to read and write when we were youngsters and so forth. And so now you're gonna tell me that this white people are gonna give you four years of education,

all you have to do is play basketball. She said, it's stupid, I can't believe you even believed that it would happen. I mean, she was probably born in the 1800s, right? Like just the idea of the game was probably silly to her, let alone that it would, yeah, it must have been outside her ability to conceive of. You know, one of the things just popped into my senior year,

she finally came to a game with my cousin and my mom. And so they were teasing her after the game because they said, George, dear didn't even know that you're only supposed to cheer for your team that your child's on. And I said, every time a basket would be scored, she would be clapping for both teams and that. But it was a great opportunity. The minute I stepped forward on Villanova's campus was a total change in my life. Educationally, I really had never really put a true value on how important education was in my life until I got to Villanova. And as a sophomore, you had to declare a major. And I really honestly, I didn't know enough about education and my future endeavors as I should. And so I asked my coach, I said,

what should I put down for a major? And he said economics. And so I majored in economics for the four years at Villanova in the School of Business and commerce. And it opened my eyes to a lot of opportunities that I never realized were important. To this day, I realize now if I had been even more dedicated, I could have easily been an A student. I didn't understand the true value of an education until it was too late to put the passion into learning that I subsequently gained. So one of my favorite things about our relationship is what actually just happened a few seconds ago, which is something popped into your mind

that you'd forgotten about. Because I feel like when I ask you, I'll think of someone or I'll think of some event and I'll go, how did you ever meet this person? Does this ever happen? And you always have, you know, a crazy story. Like when Jimmy Carter died, I texted you and I said, hey, did you ever meet Jimmy Carter?

And he said, oh, I sure did. We were in China together. So your life's absurd. That was in 1979. Nike gave myself, Bill Foster, who was the coach at Clemson at that time, and Eddie Sutton, that Nike sent us to China to do basketball clinics. And at that time, China was a communist country. Beijing didn't exist.

It was Peking. And so we started out the clinics in Shanghai. It was a little bit challenging because you couldn't get a really good rhythm going in the teaching because you'd have to stop for the person to translate the information. But they put us up at a place in Shanghai called Jingjing Hotel, which is still there now. Carter and Nixon both had meetings with the Chinese government at that hotel. And so one day we come back from doing a clinic. And when we walk into the lobby, three gentlemen approach us, shirt and tie and so forth. And the one guy shows his badge. He's from the Secret Service. And he said that,

hey, we're going to have to move you guys off that floor to another place in the hotel. We asked him, why did we have to move? And he said, well, President Carter's coming tomorrow, and he's going to be on the floor above that. And we can't have anybody on the floor right directly under them and so forth. They moved us and Jimmy Carter came to town and the Secret Service guys introduced us to him. You couldn't meet a nicer person than him or his wife. He thanked us for switching the floors and so forth. He was having a luncheon at the US Embassy, and he invited us to the luncheon, and we showed up. And the first thing that amazed me was he remembered each one of our names and addressed us by our name and that and so forth. I have

a picture at home of him standing next to his wife eating a piece of cake at that same luncheon. And little did I know that many years later, I would look back and realize I played an interesting piece of history. Interesting thing of history, why? Well, because first of all, we get to Peking, go into clinics, and our interpreter took us down to Tinamon Square. And we go down to Tinamon Square and we're taking pictures and so forth. And the crowd starts to gather around us, people just staring at us and so forth. And an elderly gentleman steps out of the crowd and he picks up my hand he goes like that and I

remember Bill Foss's wife was she was highly insulted and I said no no I get it he's never seen a black person before in his life and he thinks that this is pain I'll never forget that in my life he just he just stepped out of the crowd picked up a hand and and then I realized the next few weeks when I would think about it, I said, God, I never thought about the fact that there's a lot of people who have never seen a black person in their life.

And that was also a big, that was part of the early days of Nike and the NBA really pushing the game of basketball internationally, which would, I mean, later you would become the director of basketball internationally, which would, I mean, you later, you would become the director of international basketball at Nike, but that when people see the NBA as a global game today, it's probably one of the more next to soccer,

the most global game. Yes. That was because of trips like that. Absolutely. And the other sport that is seldom talked about, but it would certainly be in a top three global sports sports cricket. Yeah.

That's not the first president that you met though. The first president you met was Harry Truman. Harry S. Truman. When I was a senior at Villanova, I get picked to play in the East West All-Star Game, which was held in Kansas City. And at that time, it was the only college basketball All-Star Game around. And so I got selected to play on in that game. And when we're in Kansas City, President Truman invited the team, both teams out to have lunch with them at

his home. And so when we walked in, his office was like the replica of the oval office. Oh, at the library. At the library, yes. And so when we met with him, he accepted us in such a graceful manner and talked to us. But on the way out, he had just completed a two-volume book on his presidency. And so on the way out, we noticed there was a big table there with books stacked on them. And he had given each of the players a two-volume set of books. If it was here right now, I could open it up and it says, to George H. Rowling from Harry S. Truman, and it puts the date there. And so that became one of my most valuable possessions ever because how many people can say that they have a personally signed book from a president of the United States?

And so- That's where you put the speech, right? Actually, the King speech became a located inside of one of Harry S. Truman's books. And I felt, well, putting it in a book, one I'll never forget where it is if I'm looking for it. You're not going to throw that out.

Right, and you're not going to throw that out. And so that became the early storage vault for the speech to be... At that time, the speech hadn't taken on the historic significance that it ultimately would. Behind the closed doors of government offices and military compounds, there are hidden stories and buried secrets from the darkest corners of history. From covert experiments pushing the boundaries of science to operations so secretive they were barely whispered about. Each week, on redacted, declassified mysteries, we pull back the curtain on these hidden histories,

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shaping our world today. The stories are real. The secrets are shocking. Follow redacted, declassified mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Redacted early and ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Well, I was telling you, because I found this out when I was researching my justice book,

which is that Truman was the first American president to address the NAACP, and he did it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. So the full circle-ness of that is such a beautiful thought to me that that book would come to contain one of the most beautiful and evocative speeches in American history from the guy that in some ways,

I think what's fascinating to me about Truman is here you have a guy raised by racists to be racist. At one point, he casually joins the Ku Klux Klan as though it's like a bowling league because that's what other people in town were doing. His mother wouldn't stay in the Lincoln bedroom because she had negative associations with Lincoln from when she was a kid during the border skirmishes of the Civil War. And then here you have the guy who flash forward a few decades later, this is the way a human being can evolve. Truman is the guy that sets in motion the desegregation of the armed forces, who begins effectively the civil rights movement, who begins the schism in what was then the Democratic Party

of sort of Southern racists and more Northern progressives, and that people can change, and that enormous transformative movements start with ordinary people making decisions of decency and kindness and having their worldview exposed and expanded. And Truman, let us not forget, perhaps the most difficult decision he had to make as a leader was to drop the atomic bomb. I mean, that had the weight on his mind into the wee hours of the morning.

Shall we do this or should we not? And most times when people talk about President Truman, they don't reference the fact that he was the one who okayed the atomic bomb. Well, yeah, I'm just thinking about that now. Yeah, you shook hands with the only human being to use a nuclear weapon. Also came from a small town.

No one would have expected these kinds of things from just, what's fascinating to me about your life is the extraordinary people and extraordinary moments that it intersected with. I mean, so you shake hands with the guy that drops an atomic bomb. You also played basketball against and scrambled for a loose ball

with the guy that became the NBA logo. Like just the spectrum of that is pretty absurd to me. Yeah, I played against Jerry West when he was a senior at West Virginia. We played, we being Villanova, we go down to play them in Morgantown. And what was interesting, no one knew until before the game

that Villanova had any black players on the team. Cause they would have just read the box score in the newspaper. It's not like they were watching it on ESPN countdown. Yeah, or the television. And when the game starts and we were at the warmup, you could hear people buzzing in, not anything derogatory, but you could feel

a buzz in the crowd of people saying, hey, look, they got two black players on the team and that. And of course, that was the game where Jerry West stole a ball and was going down for a layup, and I chased him down. I already had my mind, there's no way he's going to lay this ball up. And I met him right at the front of the rim, and I'd altered his shot, but I didn't block it, but I knocked him into the seats underneath the basket, and he was laying there. And utter silence now goes over the arena, and he's sitting there, just laying there looking at me, and I'm thinking to myself, dear God, please let this white boy get up, or this is the end for me. So Jerry puts his hand out and I pull him forward and then we

continue to play the game. Later in life, Jerry told an interesting story about the times we spent playing against each other. And he said, Do you remember that your senior year when we played you in Morgantown, you fouled out of the game and had one of your worst games in that." And I said, yeah. I said, God, I was so psyched for the game and I ended up fouling out and only had 11 points. He says, I want to tell you something that most people don't know.

He says, and you probably don't. He says, do you remember what happened when you fouled out of the game? And I says, I probably hit him for the bench. And he says, no, I stopped you along the way and I shook hands with you and said, hey, I really enjoyed playing against you. He said, George, you're the only player in my playing career I ever shook hands with after a game or during the game.

And I had forgotten about that, but that was part of this, the relationship that ultimately carried on for the rest of our lives. Yeah. You intersected with basically every major figure in the history of basketball. And then you throw in a half dozen presidents or so too. It's pretty remarkable. President Ford now I was in, it was in Colorado. And the thing that impressed me about them all,

they had a way of making you feel as important as they were. And they always made time for you. They were sincere in their compliments. And over time, I started to collect these moments that brought me together with the president but at the time I didn't think much about it but I got to know five of them over the course of my lifetime. Yeah it's hard to believe. For a kid you know living above a grocery store in Washington, D.C. I look back on my life and when the approval

of a lot of people who then in turn to help mentor me or give me an opportunity, and certainly one of the best things that ever happened to me in my adult life was the opportunity to work at Nike. And at the time when I was given the responsibility to be the global director of basketball at Nike, number one, I was 62 years old. Number two, the department didn't exist before that. It was a startup, and I was responsible to build basketball sports marketing into a global entity. At that time, Nike's footprint in basketball was domestic.

They didn't have an international presence. And so the first thing that I tried to do was to sponsor the Chinese national team. And I was able to get that done. And subsequently along the way, we ended up signing about a 20-year deal with them. But that allowed me to get into China. And I was keenly aware that basketball was the number one sport in China. Basketball came to China shortly after the missionaries came from Springfield. And that's to this day,

that basketball is still the number one sport in China. And so we started some programs to help their best players realize their true identity. And one of the first players that we were able to bring over was Yao Ming. We brought Yao Ming over to the United States when he was 18 years old, and we kept him over here the entire summer and had him playing for one of our travel teams. He played at the All-American camp. And somewhere in my collection, I have a picture of Yao Ming guarding Michael Jordan at the Michael Jordan's kids' camp. And look at Yao Ming, he's down in the stands and he's guarding MJ. I'm sure Michael was very welcoming and took it very easy on him, right? As it turned out, Michael was really fascinated by how tall he was.

He worked with him up at camp through. We had an interpreter up at camp to help him with this game and that. But that was a great summer. At that point, I realized that Yao Ming not only could be the best player to ever come out of China, but he could be one of the best players on the globe. He pretty much lived up to that expectation of himself as a player and obviously ended up playing in the NBA Hall of Fame. So that was the very first steps of the Nike-China basketball relationship. We started doing a basketball camp over there every year, and then we did a camp for their coaches. And we were able to really make some meaningful steps forward because what we were doing is investing in their future. We weren't trying to buy anything from them or get

anything from them. We were trying to make sure that they were on the right track toward the future. Talk to me about your journaling habit, because one of the texts you sent me that affected me very deeply, you just sent me this sort of page in your journal where you'd ask this question. You said, what am I made for? And then you'd put down these bullets sort of ruminating on that most essential of questions, which is like, why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What are we supposed to make of this gift that we've been given? And that's what ultimately became the book, but that came out of your journaling. I started journaling in 1972 when I was at Washington State.

I would underline things in books or write notes to myself. And then once a week, I'd give them to my secretary and I'd ask her to type these out. And then I'd put them in plastic sheets. So I have every journal I kept from 1972 to this day now. I have all those journals year by year. And the last, I'd say, eight or nine years, I've done most of the transcribing myself. I take two or three hours on a Sunday and I sit down and I write my notes out in my journal

from things that I've learned or read in books. And so- And you collect this into like a single- Yeah, and then I collect that into a single journey for the year. I actually have one of them here, if you want a tan book with the notes in it. Yeah, they call that a commonplace book,

like a collection of thoughts and ideas and inspirations. That's what you're keeping? Yeah, as you can see, it says on there 2020, but this is one of the books that, this is when I stopped doing the typing and started to collect information and kept my notes. So I have one of these for every year, but here I kind of took my own way of keeping notes and that. And so, like I said, I have every year since 1972, I have these journals, and they're a great

reference for me when I'm speaking or writing an article or something like that. But this is the earlier ones in the 70s were three-ring binders. Yeah. There's a line in Jewish culture, they say, we keep the Sabbath, but mostly the Sabbath keeps us. And I think there's something about keeping a journal where, yeah, you're keeping the journal, but the journal is helping you keep it together. Keeps your thoughts organized, it calms you down, it gives you perspective, it gives you a little space. Even if you never go back through it ever again,

it was the act of doing it that gives you most of the value. Yeah, it's so true because I actually looked forward to it. I would come across bits of information that I thought were really relevant, and I'd write down notes to myself. And then once a week, I would go back to my journal and I'd make the entries in there. And so it became a great source of learning for me because I could go back and refer to things. If I were going to do a talk on the relevance of truth, over the years I'd probably have a 100-page notes just on truth,

that where I wrote them into the journal and so forth. But it struck me as interesting that even in your 80s, you were still thinking about like why you're here, what is the purpose of this? It strikes me that that realization you had that you basically doubled the life expectancy that was predicted for you at your birth, that you're sort of like, well, I got two lives,

how am I gonna spend it? What am I gonna have to show for this? Like Seneca has this line about how a lot of old people have nothing to show for their age, but a high number of years. And it seems like you're really fascinated and feel compelled to have answers to those kinds of questions about what you used it for? I really, when I asked myself, who am I, I think I'm one of God's disciples. And I felt that the reason I'm on earth is to serve the needs of others,

to help people live a better life. I've always believed, if you help enough people get what they want, you'll always get what you want. Yeah. And so over the years, I've always tried to find ways to serve the needs of others. And as a result, it came back to pay me later in life or reward me later in life. Thanks so much for listening.

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