Long before there was the stellar football career at Georgia Tech, before there were Super Bowls with the Green Bay Packers and Baltimore Colts, before he headed football programs at Georgia Tech, Alabama, Kentucky and Georgia State ... Bill Curry had books.
It has been more than 50 years, but Curry still remembers those easy-to-read inspirational biographies that were in his grammar school and how he let them take him to far-away places. And he will tell you to this day that those little bio books helped frame his career.
Mythologist and philosopher Joseph Campbell describes "bliss" as any activity in which one loses track of time. The dictionary defines it as pure joy, supreme happiness.
I am a storyteller, and when I'm relating a tale I am in a state of bliss. The learning and telling of the stories have become my passion. I speak the story or I write it. Folks listen, folks read and I am happy, lost in the process. Or ... they do not listen or read. In the latter cases, I have come to understand my choice of story or timing is inappropriate.
Miss Mabel Bolton was my fourth-grade teacher. A perceptive, careful person, she read to each of us and always knew what to say or do to keep our attention, be it through discipline or as simple a thing as location in the classroom.
I was an active, volatile 9-year-old who loved to read, so she settled me down near a small shelf of biographies in the rear of the room. I sneaked them into quiet moments, making George Washington, Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig, Madame Curie and Thomas Edison my new best friends.
I realize now that as surely as those great people filled up my small world, they were awakening me in a way that endures to this day. I began to do two things related to my newfound passion: I told their stories and began to focus upon my own.
I was transformed. I had just a glimmer of Goethe's notion when he wrote, "Whatever you can dream or do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
The stories still strike me as incredible. Washington was discouraged at Valley Forge. Jackie Robinson was spat upon and called awful names. Gehrig was the subject of anti-German prejudice during World War I. Madame Curie was "just a woman" in the man's world of science. Edison, as a boy, was described as an "addled mind," incapable of learning. What made them different?
I have studied the subject all these years. The great human beings usually share five common characteristics. In my sport, we call them champions:
1. Have singleness of purpose. They know who they are and what to do.
2. Are unselfish. They give sacrificially to causes greater than themselves.
3. Are tough. They take responsibility, making no excuses, pointing no fingers. They lead by example.
4. Are smart. They are prepared. They are willing to do the work the competition is unwilling to do.
5. And they never quit. Never.
— Compiled by external content editor Tim Ellerbee.
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