My Confession Box

Monday, September 14, 2009

Previously I talked about confidence and believing in yourself. Well there’s something else to it that I forgot to mention. You’ll probably get the message after watching this video …

Did you catch what I left out?
Ray Allen: “My confidence in my games comes in just my preparations.”
Gilbert Arenas: “My Dad was always told me that if you wanna be good, you know you got to keep at it because while your resting someone else out there is working in the world”

There’s this anime that I like a lot, It’s called “Hajime No Ippo!” It’s about boxing and there was this particular part where the middle weight boxer Takamura went into the finals against the world champion, surprisingly by round 5 he was in a state of semiconscious and the particular thing that kept him going was the basics, those long tiring days of doing the same thing again and again. His vision was compromised; he couldn’t hear his coach yelling at him, all he could hear was the crowd cheering. Despite all that he was able to execute his moves because it has been drilled into him. Likewise, if you want to be good at something, you’ve got to work extremely hard to an extent that it gets drilled into you. Just like what Ray Allen said, I believe that the only confidence that I will have is in my preparations.

3 weeks back, I thought about this and thought of a different way in training myself. I practiced a lot be it in terms of physique or technique. All those hard work paid off today. Every Sunday, me and my friends would play 5v5 full court basketball and at the end of each of those days, we’d end up defeated utterly by those older more experienced guys, despite so I’d always tell my friends that those guys on the court weren’t gonna win for long. We’ll defeat the next time. Week after week, time after time I’d say the same thing and guess what? This time, the day ended without me saying the same thing because we finally won and it was no fluke, we did it twice in a row.

I realized that after I flared up and exploded on one of my friends, people started to take things more seriously and we changed our style of playing. We played what’d you call basketball formations where there is a movement pattern that we have to adopt. It took us time to learn it, it started off quite ugly but as time passed we got good at it and it certainly helped us clinch our victory today. Set aside the formation, another determining factor was will power or rather FIGHTING SPIRIT! Fast breaks in basketball really require a lot of energy, you’d have to sprint with all your might and get to the other end before the defense returns and today we all ran like we’ve ran before.

I feel that lately we were playing more like a team and it gave me the feeling of what’s it like to play in a real basketball club. It’s always been my dream to play in a basketball CCA in school where we get to enter competitions, stay over-night for camps, understand one another and appreciate each other. I hope I can realize this dream when I get to Australia. Whenever I tell my friends that I can’t stand physical activities in the army but yet if it were to be basketball training and even if it were to be 2 times tougher, I’d go all out. They will always highlight this as sheer irony.

[It’s all about fun, and I really love it very much.]

the origin.12:39 AM