Jim Valvano's Heck of a Day
Swiping right on daily essentials
If you follow me on Blue Sky or on TikTok (just look for HerbertHistory) you’ll know that I was fooling around on Hinge at dinner last night. Hinge is one of those dating sites where you swipe left or swipe right based on your preferences.1 One of the things you have to do is fill out little prompts about yourself. I am horrible at this. I never know how to say that I’m a regular guy with a PhD who can bench press a bus. And before we get started on all that, please know that no matter what anyone tells you, the last thing people want is a regular guy.2
But one of the prompts was to talk about my daily essentials. And that got me thinking, what are my daily essentials? There’s a bunch, actually. Bathing is big. I like hygiene, but I don’t think that’s really something you should have to advertise. Ok, so what else? My buddy JP makes fun of me for this, but I need Cuban coffee in the morning. It gets me going and reminds me of home in Florida.3 Ok, so there’s one. And that got me thinking about someone else’s daily essentials.
Jim Valvano was a Hall of Fame basketball coach most famously known for running around the court looking for someone to hug after his team upset the Houston Cougars in the 1983 NCAA championship game. Witness below. It’s pure joy.4
But ten years later Jimmy V was dying of cancer and time was not on his side. During its annual award show—the ESPYs—the network awarded the coach the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, named for another man taken too soon. Everyone in the audience knew Valvano’s health was failing. Dick Vitale had to help him up the stage, and was joined by Mike Krzyzewski in helping him down.
So every minute counted, even in his eleven minutes on stage.
There’s something different about talking with someone at the end of their life. All the bullshit is gone. It is pure honesty. I remember the conversations with my grandfather as his days wore down. He had always been clear with me, but in the last couple of years I think he sense I was looking for answers and there wasn’t time for sugar coating. So the words Valvano chose that night are especially important because they represent his thoughts on life and the human experience.
His big message was about fighting the metastatic carcinoma that was ravaging his body, bravely telling the audience and listeners down the road “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.”
But I think what resonated in me as a 15 year old boy and has carried through the last 32 years have been his thoughts on what made a complete day. According to Coach Valvano, each day he needed to spend time in thought, he needed to laugh, and he needed to be moved to tears. That to him was “a heck of a day.”
I’m a historian by training. I read a lot. I remember a bunch, but I’ve forgotten even more. But that message of Valvano’s heck of a day has always stuck with me. I think it’s the best speech I’ve ever heard, mostly because of its clarity and its urgency.
Think. Laugh. Cry. You’ve experienced the fullness of human emotions. Perhaps I would add Love to this, but I think in thinking and laughing and crying you are experiencing the aspects of love anyway, much as the color green encapsulates blue and yellow.
Right now I feel like so many of us are living tied to other emotions—despair, annoyance, frustration, rage, fear. So I’ve added the speech above so that you might watch it, and I truly hope that you do. Spend 11 minutes of your day with a man who implores you to live your fullest life.
So what were my daily essentials? I chose Cuban coffee, thinking, and kindness. I wanna be kind the world and hopefully one day I’ll find someone to be kind with.
But right now, I am wishing you a heck of a day.
Jason
My friend Thomas Lecaque would like you to know that I am contractually banned from dating any more Cuban women because the last one devoured my soul right in front of me.
I apparently need to be brooding and have baggage. And a six pack. And since I live in Colorado, a jet. But I digress.
Actually the Cuban attorney taught me how to make that. Wait—do I have baggage? Sweet. The inbox is gonna explode.
Unless you are a Houston fan.
Anytime I think of Jim Valvano I rember when he and Vitale did an episode of “The Cosby Show”. Delightful.
I once had a friend who missed her husband's Cuban coffee most of all when they got divorced.