Quote from the bouch:
Also the defining characteristic of most losing traders...
I wonder if he felt like giving up then
I went to my room and I closed the door and cried,"For a while I couldn't stop. Even though there was no one else home at the time, I kept the door shut. It was important to me that no one else hear me or see me."
In a sense, he owns the world. To me, though, perhaps the most remarkable part of his story is the fact that, as a sophomore in high school, he was cut from his school's basketball team. I kept wondering about how it affected him at the time it happened. He wanted to play with the others, and was told that he wasn't good enough.
One evening, as we sat and talked before a game, he spoke about it. I wasn't surprised that he remembered every detail.
"For about two weeks, every boy who had tried out for the basketball team knew what day the cut list was going to go up," he said. "We knew that it was going to be posted in the gym in the morning.
"So that morning we all went in there and the list was up. I had a friend, and we went in to look at the list together.
"We stood there and looked for our names. If your name was on the list, you were still on the team. If your name wasn't on the list, you were cut. His name was on the list. He made it. Mine wasn't on the list.
"I looked and looked for my name," he said. "It was almost as if I thought that if I didn't stop looking, it would be there."
he, as if envisioning the list anew, said: "It's alphabeticaland I wasn't there, and I went back up and started over again. But I wasn't there.
"I went through the day numb. I sat through my classes. I had to wait until after school to go home. That's when I hurried to my house and I closed the door of my room and I cried so hard. It was all I wanted -- to play on that team.
"My mother was at work, so I waited until she got home, and then I told her. She knew before I said anything that something was wrong, and I told her I had been cut from the team. When you tell your mom something like that the tears start again, and the two of you have an after-cry together."
At the end of that basketball season, he said, he asked the coach if he could right the bus with the team to the district tournament. Just to watch the other boys play.
"The coach told me no." He said. "But I asked again, and he said I could come. But when we got to the gym, he said he didn't know if I could go in. He told me that the only way I could go in was to carry the players' uniforms. So that's what I did. I walked into the building carrying the uniforms for the players who had made the team. What made me feel the worst about that was that my parents had come to watch the tournament, and when they saw me walking in carrying the uniforms, they thought I was being given the chance to play.
"That's what hurt me. They thought I was being given a chance."
He is very likely the best basketball player who ever lived. If you ever wondered why he continues to work so hard, the answer may lie in this story. It must be so rare for a professional athlete to have once been cut from a high school team. The men who make it to the pros have always been the best on every playground, the best in every class, the best in every school.
"It's OK, though," he said. "It's probably good that it happened."
Good?
"I think so," Jordan said. "It was good because it made me know what disappointment felt like," he said. "And I knew that I didn't want to have that feeling ever again."
