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Commentary
The role of luck — in hoops and life
Like all Celtics fans, I’m reeling from the roller coaster ride of the team’s series with the Miami Heat. After coming all the way back to tie things up, their Game 7 loss was a major letdown. But it wasn’t entirely surprising either: There’s a reason no team in NBA history has ever managed to win after being down 3-0.
There’s a lot to consider and appreciate about this matchup, and this season, but the thing I’m left thinking about most is the nature of luck.
The Celtics were a very up and down team this year. At times, they looked like an historic franchise. At others, they couldn’t seem to buy a basket. They had the best record in the league going into the All-Star break, then struggled down the home stretch.
The pundits will tell you that their losses were all about lack of determination and bad strategy (and, man, has the Celtic’s young, first-year coach taken a beating in the press the second half of this season). But anyone who’s played a little ball can tell you that basketball is a game of inches. Sometimes the ball falls in the cylinder, sometimes it bounces out. And at least part of that calculus involves luck.
This year’s Celtics, more than almost any team in the league, have relied heavily on the three-point shot. It’s a shot that requires skill, hours of practice … and luck. It requires putting a 9.5-inch ball through an 18-inch hoop from over 23 feet away — usually on the run and with a hand in your face. Even the best three-point shooters in the history of the league miss considerably more of them than they make.
But closer to the basket, too, luck plays a larger role than we tend to acknowledge. Consider Game 6 of the Miami series. It took a lot of grit and determination for the Celtics to give themselves a chance in that game, but it was largely luck that allowed Derrick White to win it by tipping a rebound in with 0.1 seconds left on the clock.
Why do we struggle so much to accept the role that luck plays in sports — and in our lives?
I’m a musician and my wife, Jane Roper, is a writer. We work hard and we’re pretty good at what we do, but we’re also humble enough to know that we’ve been lucky. We’ve both gotten breaks in our careers that have allowed us to keep moving forward. Just as important, we were both born into lucky circumstances: We had supportive parents and enough of a financial cushion to be able to spend some time learning our crafts.
Maybe part of the reason we’re more able than some to acknowledge the role of luck in our lives has to do with our daughter. When she was five, one of our twins was diagnosed with leukemia. It’s a diagnosis received by .0047% of kids under the age of 20. We were extremely unlucky.
But she survived and, 11 years later, is a healthy 16-year-old. We were extremely lucky.
I struggled for years to process our family’s journey with cancer. I needed there to be some meaning behind it all. It’s true that some unexpectedly good things did come out of it. For one thing, it connected us with other families on the same “crappy little boat ride” (as my wife puts it) and we were both able to use our art — me through music, Jane through writing — to try to be of some use to other families.
I struggled for years to process our family’s journey with cancer. I needed there to be some meaning behind it all.
But ultimately, I had to come to terms with the fact that we had simply had a close encounter with the random nature of luck.
The Serenity Prayer, often invoked in Alcoholics Anonymous, asks each of us to “accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
It’s a wise adage, and it’s a funny characteristic of our species that we so often need to hit bottom — whether it’s the bottom of addiction or the bottom of parenting a sick child — to learn what seems so plain: We are not nearly as in control as we wish to think we are.
Imagine if the all the millionaires and billionaires born on third base, convinced they’ve hit a triple (some of whom run for president on the strength of that misplaced confidence) could see their inherited privilege for what it is. They might be a little more gracious and effective at their jobs.
The same goes for the rest of us born with some form of privilege. We might be a little more empathetic and appreciative of the circumstances of those “down on their luck” if we could see just how much so many of us are “up” on our own.
The Celtics' season is done. The pressures of an angry press and fan base may push them to break the team up and make some major trades over the summer. I hope they won’t. I like this team, and still think they’re capable of winning a championship with their core crew.
Either way, I wish them skill, tenacity and passion for next season. And I wish them — and all of us — luck.
