Quitting on Top: Sunday musings…2/9/2025
“Quitting on top is not the same as quitting.” Bob Myers, former Golden State Warriors GM to Adrian Wojnarowski, St. Bonaventure Basketball GM and former ESPN NBA analyst.
Media of all shapes and sizes is simply filled to the brim this weekend with questions about what will become of the players, coaches, and other various “names” if the Kansas City Chiefs win an unprecedented third Super Bowl in a row. Will Travis Kelce drop to a knee at midfield and deliver a diamond to the left hand of his girlfriend, sending them off on the next phase of their fairy tale? Or how about Andy Reid, the storied coach who brought the trophy to both Philadelphia and KC? I mean, no one, not even Don Shula or Chuck Noll pulled off three in a row. Dropping the mike and exiting stage left at that point would be the epitome of “quitting on top”.
And yet, neither is likely to happen.
Who among us is not familiar with the saying “winners never quit; quitters never win”? You don’t have to come from a sports-crazy family to have heard that at least once from your parents. Heck, even my in-laws, two educators who were raising three daughters, with only a passing interest in sport of any kind, and that only as spectators, almost certainly used that exact phrase when it was time for one of the girls to suck it up and carry on. But the reality is that everything eventually has a logical conclusion, a time when being done is simply the only conclusion, that is not really quitting at all.
Think of a pair of wrestling shoes left as the retiring wrestler leaves the ring one final time.
Wojnarowski, Woj to millions, had reached a kind of peak in the world of basketball commentary. This had been his stated goal since early in college, and he spent nearly a decade at the top. Unlike the athletes who provided the fodder for his missives, Woj left his shoes in the ring while still performing as well, or better than his earlier years, and showed no signs of having lost a step on the competition. Why did he leave the arena while still at the top of his game? It seems that his particular “top” was a plateau rather than a peak, and it took just as much time and effort to remain on that flat as it had taken to arrive there. Time he’d not given to family or friends. A plateau that, however wide, still had little room for anything or anyone else if one was to stay. Having given what it took to get there he looked around and saw other places to put that time, other places to be that had room for others to join him, and he climbed down.
Does that mean he quit? I admit that I have never experienced the kind of peak that Woj reached. Certainly not as an athlete or in the professional world of my day job. Never a valedictorian or MVP, busiest, richest, or firstest. And yet I get everything about both what it was that Woj set out to achieve, how he pursued it, what it took to get there, and why and when he decided that he was, indeed, on top, could stop and move on.
Some people carry on because they simply can’t think about what else they might move on to. Doctors are notoriously like this. Come to think of it, so are lawyers and politicians. Athletics and athletes provide an excellent window through which to observe this. Why, for instance, does Lebron James still toil in the NBA? Near the top, but no longer truly there, player or team. For every Barry Sanders who walked away from the NFL when he was by far the best running back in the league, or Andrew Luck, the Colts quarterback who retired because he looked ahead and simply didn’t see enough added to his life by playing any longer, there are a dozen Brett Favre’s or Aaron Rogers who simple play on until their battered bodies are scraped off the field, legacies diminished by not quitting while on top.
One is left to wonder why as much about Tom Brady and his last few years as one wonders if, say, George Blanda would have mustered on for 26 years had he made Tom Brady money. Woj walked away from the money, too. Not Lebron James or Andrew Luck money, but Barry Sanders money for sure. Is it the fame? The rush of the bright lights? Of, I dunno, mattering? It brings to mind “Encore”, a lesser known song written by the great Stephen Stills: “Whatcha gonna do when the last show is over? And whatcha gonna do when you can’t touch base? And whatcha gonna do when the applause is all over, and you can’t turn your back on what you face?” I’d be willing to bet that the endorphin rush of seeing something you wrote being tagged a massive “Woj bomb” was comparable to nailing a 3-pointer at the buzzer in a mid-season NBA game or being summoned back to the stage for an encore.
So why now? There were surely more “bombs” to drop just as Mr. James will surely drop more game winners and Stephen stills will play one more song, before he leaves the arena. Adrian Wojanowski hasn’t reached out to let me know, and for sure Lebron James won’t be any more likely to take me into his confidence or take my advice than he did back in his first stop in Cleveland (search “Random Thoughts” for “It’s Not About the Money”). But still, I think Woj has shed enough light on his decision (written in places such as the NYT, WSJ and Sports Illustrated) to see that he might very well have been reading my drivel all along: Woj realized that he is more than what he does, and that reaching a summit that turned out to be a high plateau was enough. Especially one that only had room for one.
And so congratulations and good luck with your Bonnies, Woj. Someday you will quit that job, too, whether or not you make it to the top there, too. Who you are and what you do will continue to intersect over your lifetime. You know what else folks say about this kind of stuff? “It’s lonely at the top.” If you get to the top and discover that there isn’t room there for you and the people you love, well, quitting at the top might turn out to be the ultimate type of winning after all.
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 9th, 2025 at 11:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.