Jim Valvano

I know I've wrote about him before in my blog. However, it's worth it to write about him again. I just watched a 2-hour special show on ESPN about him and his magical 1983 championship team. He was the coach of North Carolina State that year. This team wasn't even supposed to make the NCAA tournament. They had a pretty poor record. They went into the conference tournament as a huge underdog. They fought and clawed their way through the tournament and won it. They were behind in those games with little time left, yet they still never gave up. Once they got to the NCAA tournament, they fought some more. The team they beat in the finals was supposedly much better than them. They didn't care. They beat them on a last second shot. Jim Valvano made many, many motivational speeches to his team that year. They even cut down the nets at the beginning of the year so that they knew what it was like to do it. Cutting down the nets is a tradition that happens when teams win the championship. They did it at the beginning of the season! Jim Valvano lost his battle with cancer in June of 1993. He made one last speech in March of that year at the Espy awards. There was not a dry eye in the crowd. His famous line is "Don't give up...don't ever give up." He had a way with words. People listened to him and believed everything he had to say. He never had a negative outlook on anything. He fought for everything in life. I wish students these days could have met Jim Valvano and seen what he was like. I wish kids had the determination he had. I knew a lot about Valvano before the show, but I learned a lot more about him tonight. Staying up way past my bedtime to watch the show about Jim Valvano and his 1983 North Carolina State Wolfpack was totally worth it.