Healthy things grow. Growing things change. (Bot9 #351)
The statement above seems like an easy thing to grasp. Something that his healthy is bound to grow, and something that is growing is bound to change. However, this can be a difficult phrase to hear depending on where you are in life. I remember when I heard it for the first time. There was a lot of change happening around me professionally and it was hard. I’m not sure I was ready for the amount of change at the time, or the speed of it, and I had to lean into this idea being true. And it is. But in order for us to be healthy, we must pursue our own growth and expect things to change as a result.
The image at the top of this week’s Bottom of the Ninth is Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, which happened this week in 1974. I’d encourage you to not only watch the video, but also listen to the great Vin Scully’s call of the moment. A few seconds after Aaron crosses the plate to a mob of teammates, Scully begins to capture the magnitude of the moment. He points to how amazing it is, in 1974, that “A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South.” The practice of slavery in our country was an abomination to humanity and the continued abuse of African Americans through lynchings and Jim Crow laws was still fresh in Scully’s mind coming out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. For just a moment, a baseball milestone displayed how our collective perspective as a country had signified change as a result of a difficult period of growth.
In a different way, the recently released story of Nike’s rise to prominence as told by the film Air also puts on display how industry can experience growth through change. The basketball division of Nike was floundering and they chose to bet all of their annual player budget on one man - Michael Jordan. This single gamble paid off for Nike as a worldwide brand, but it also changed how we think about how athletes and products interact. Athletes could be as big, or bigger, than the brands they represented, or just be brands all to themselves. Interestingly, Sonny Vaccaro, played by Matt Damon in the movie, was also involved in the lawsuit against EA Sports alongside Ed O’Bannon, which has sent collegiate sports headlong into the now well-known phrase “Name, Image, and Likeness.” The growth in the mid-80s lead to extraordinary change which is affecting those of us in athletics still today.
Part of the journey of anyone involved in athletics is a search for greatness, and even immortality. We see it in Aaron’s pursuit of a record held for so many years by a previous legend of the game, Babe Ruth. In Air, we hear it come through in Vaccaro’s boardroom pitch to Jordan and his parents (as well as Phil Knight’s response afterwards). They pitched him on how Michael would transcend the sport and the brand. What we know is that the greatest transformative power available to us is not in the pursuit up the ladder, but moving down in status by serving more people. We know that the celebration of Easter is the recognition of the one who came to serve us all, and Jesus presents us with the opportunity to transform our lives. When we submit our pursuit to His story instead of our own, we move from death to life. We gain the opportunity to add to the story of Jesus through the blood of His sacrifice. As the song says, “What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” It is that wholeness we pursue for growth and look forward to the change expectantly as a result.