Identity

     Life is a period of time. Like a game of basketball, we only have so many minutes on the clock: only so many moments to make a play, only so many opportunities to score points, and only one chance to make every moment count.

     Thirty-six years ago Greg Jack stood tall, 6-foot-7, in his fitted purple jersey and high-top sneakers. It was 1975, and the UW Huskies were behind 67-69 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament game against Missouri.

     Jack was a legend from Mercer Island High School: A basketball All-American (one of few in Mercer Island History), a straight-A student and class valedictorian. He had his pick of most Pac-8 teams, but he chose Washington over Oregon and Stanford.

     Jack, a senior forward for the Huskies, tipped one in to tie the score at 67, and the crowd’s scream boasted his heroic moment. With seconds remaining, Jack lifted and cupped a teammate’s missed jumper and shoved it back toward the rim. But this time, the ball circled around the basket and fell to the floor. The buzzer sounded, and the game was over. Jack’s identity -- my father’s all-consuming basketball career -- was all over at once.

     Now, he watches college basketball on his enormous television in bed, where he cannot move without a nurse assisting him 24/7.

     That moment when the ball didn't drop, has lingered with my father. The “what-ifs,” and constant replays ran through his mind while he laid stagnant.

     He was living with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammation of nerve fibers that affects the central nervous system. Of the two types of this disease, he has the worst kind. His body is continuing to shut down, and for more than 10 years, he has been propped in a reclining position in his black electric wheelchair.

     His identity was completely lost. But his character, his distinctiveness, his voice was still very present.

     My sophomore year of high school, I had to make a decision: Would I take the challenge to attempt to play college basketball? Would I endure in hours of training, camps, and select-teams to maybe play at the college level?

Or would I close the door and start anew?

     There were so many opportunities I wanted from both options, but I chose the latter, even though I loved basketball and all its possibilities. I chose to quit my old identity, to start anew.

     The best way I can describe my emotions when making this decision is from a New York Times article by Tyler Kepner published early February. Dirk Hayhurst is an author of two books and talks about his middling career in baseball:  “I think people want athletes to say, ‘I’m never giving up, I’m going to fight till the bitter end,’” Hayhurst said. “But that’s just it: at the bitter end, you turn bitter. You’re like a junkie, strung out on baseball, because that’s your whole identity. I’ve always tried to take the hype out of it.”

     Although I was incredibly relieved to be done with sports, I felt trepidation entering my new world in college as an “ex-athlete” —the withdrawal from stimulating-competition, the support/ training with teammates, and the credibility basketball gave me—to finally put those hard-working years on the shelf, it was a short-lived relief.

     In my new situation, I struggled to make the transition from elite athlete to regular person. I had to face that what used to define me and my lifestyle for so long, was now lost and I couldn’t get those experiences back.

     Where is that confident identity I had throughout high school that I somehow misplaced?  I was filled with enthusiasm and courage. I felt distinctive passion in the heat of the game. All my stress and anxieties disappeared when I played ball: stress of homework, stress of family-related issues, stress of peers, popularity, and the other nonsense teenagers undergo during their adolescence.

It was like I had four quarters to live, and each heartbeat in sync with each minute on the scoreboard.

     I felt completely disconnected from myself entering college. I faced a physical crisis, knowing I would struggle to maintain my athletic body and to this day, I still am emotionally dealing with regrets and the many “what ifs” from high school.

     Two questions that have often plagued me have only become clearer in the wake of my college graduation in June: Where is my true voice?    What is my identity?

How do I find the true voice I had before, and how can I keep it lasting?

    My father seemed to have it. Greg Jack had a voice -- a voice that kept pushing him through basketball and academics.

     He was a golden boy with good looks, smarts and a perfect jump shot – the jump shot he taught me from his wheelchair about 11 years ago: the square up, knees bent, and a high-jump as I force the ball up as it rolls off my index finger last.

How do you find your identity? And what happens when that identity you’ve built your entire world around crumbles or just plain stops from life’s circumstances?

     Back in 1981, my father was ambitious to follow his new identity. He attended Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where he became an ophthalmologist, like his father.

     But here is where he started to stumble. His left side became very numb and he, like any of us would do, went into immediate denial.

     The fuzzy vision he experienced in college was his first symptom of MS. He was told to use eye drops, and it was probably just his nerves.

“I had it, and I knew it,” my Dad, Greg, said. “I remember sitting in the library, studying MS, when I started to get all of these symptoms. I didn’t want to keep reading.”

     Yet my father pushed forward. His ambitions to pursue his career lead him to fulfilling an internship at Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center and his residency at Greater Baltimore Medical Center.

     Jack continued for nine years rotating between eye clinics located in the Seattle and North Seattle area. He also performed many cataract surgeries, but gave up doing intricate procedures because he was fearful he might harm his patients because of his declining health.

     He did 500 eyelid surgeries with the help of a magnifying glass, but he had to stop that too. He was left conducting basic eye exams. He felt he was worse than his patients, and at that time, he knew he had to quit.

It may be too late for some readers, but this is a lesson we can learn and apply in all aspects of our life: Don’t take life for granted and make every moment count.

     The experiences in our life are creating memories, shaping us as individuals, and determining the happiness we feel in our lives.

     High school athletes, college-athletes, and people in general, will inevitably lose some part of their identities.

     It is the choices we make and our perspective we choose that affect our lives and the identities we desire to have.

But through all the years I knew my father with MS, he had never complained once.

During the remainder of my father’s life, he laid fixed in his chair, incapable of doing anything for himself.

The disease held my father’s body captive, but he embodied heroism, strength, kindness and love, and from stories like his, I have nothing to take for granted.

  In life I have found that our identities are really just identifiers—like a color mixed with many other colors upon a large painting, or a note in a song that just keeps playing through life.

     My father instilled within me a voice. I heard it at the free throw line when I scored 2-2 with one second remaining—a one-point victory that sent us to the State Championship my sophomore year and we won the 2006 State Title. I heard my father’s voice when I got the acceptance letter to study at the University of Washington like he did as a young man.

     There will be days where our identity is secured and set, but I think the trick to life is to never get too comfortable. We never know how the game of life will develop, we never know if we’ll win or lose, foul out, or score 30 points. But, what we do know, what we can control in life is our perspective. 

   We can control the outcome of our relationships, the identities we want to have, and the voice we choose to hear—this is more rewarding than any trophy or Pac 10 title.

    But through all the sports games we play, or the trials and tribulations we experience in life—our voice we have deep inside us will carry us through all of our identities, and through all our experiences in this big game called life.

     My father told me he saw profound ability in me —that we all have abilities and there are many avenues to try. As a young man he had been told he had similar talents to mine but he didn’t pursue those abilities; and he told me these are the decisions I must consider. Like Wayne Gretsky famously said, and my father repeatedly told me, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”