The Things We Carry
Figure skater Sarah Hughes was sixteen years old when she glided to a gold medal in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. Our team was participating in the Big 12 Basketball Tournament when she shot up from fourth to first on the wings of a technically demanding free-skate routine. The phenom from Long Island, who’d been skating since she was three, jumped and twirled and spun and whirled in a sequined lavender costume with a grin as big as Dallas fixed across her face. She attacked the ice. Swirling and floating as if untethered, she flew around the rink and into America’s heart. My team and I didn’t know an axel from a lutz from a toe loop, but we sat spellbound watching her let herself skate free.
As the music rose to its crescendo, her competitive routine coming to its close, Sarah spun like a tiny tightly wound-up ballerina inside a jewelry box. Then BAM! Driving her blades into the ice, sending a cloud of frozen mist rising up around her, she threw both arms down and out, palms open in a physical “ta dah!”
Our entire team exploded in a raucous standing ovation from our fifth-floor Marriott suite.
She knew. We knew. The world knew. The Olympic-size moment was scarcely large enough to hold young Sarah Hughes.
“Do that.” I beseeched our talented team, once the mayhem calmed and they quieted. “This week when you play, play basketball the way she skated. Let the world in on how much you love the game!”
We were the number one seed in the tourney, the team carrying the bright red bullseye the field was aiming for. “Don’t wait for great to come to you. Go get it!!” I implored.
That night our managers blew up pictures of the teenage Olympic gold medalist and plastered them to the walls of the hotel suite where our team would continue to meet throughout the week. We taped “Sarah” on the back of a chair along our sideline in Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium where we competed. And when we filed out to play for all the conference marbles, our players high-fived the photo of her above the locker-room door. We made her one of us in hopes she might rub off.
I thought of Sarah Hughes this winter as I watched Alysa Liu. It’s almost impossible to look away from those who have loosened from themselves.
Our basketball team cruised to the 2002 Big 12 Tournament title, cutting down the nets amidst confetti. We played well that week while playing free. Then we danced our way through March to the National Championship game in San Antonio. Our players were good and they were good together, but we were one of the final two standing in large part because we stayed out of our own way.
Many a performer has tripped on their own shadow. An easy thing to talk about. An albatross to slay.
Every March when basketball madness ensues, a Cinderella rises to fame. Someone no one (or at least not very many anyones) expected to survive and advance plays on. We marvel at their moxie. The underestimation that doesn’t stifle. The belief the underdogs seem to have in themselves despite what the world has to say.
Oddly, though, the anti-favorites have a hidden advantage. They sneak in through the side door while the supposed-to-wins ride in on a float with a seabird draped around their neck.
Step one for winning— especially when it matters most— is to avoid self-sabotage. The fowl, at the hands of its carrier, must be put to death.
We remember those who crumble under the heaviness. (Such is the negative fixation of our world.) The number one who gets knocked off by the feisty sixteen-seed. The “quad god” who flips and falls. Yet rarely do we pause to consider all the things they carry when they take center stage.
The ones who find a way to let their best come out often do so in wildly different ways. In team sports, players who shift their focus to their teammates sometimes find that re-established locus of control lessens the weight. For individual competitors, a vivid visualization of an unrelated happy place can set them free. Every performer’s release of self-interference is learned through trial and error and is unique, specifically, to them.
What matters not is how they get there. What matters is that they find a way to let themselves let go.
P.S. Let it go!