Success is a Choice [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION 'ii i, The Wildcats' 1997 season was, for me, the most rewarding of my years at Kentucky. It was a microcosm, in a sense, of the last chapter in this book, "Surviving Success." Not only were we coming off the high of winning the national championship the year before, but we also had lost four key players to the NBA draft. So we began the season with an awesome challenge if we were to have the kind of success we had come to expect of ourselves. To maintain the level of excellence we—and everyone else—required, we had to increase our work ethic, redouble our efforts, push ourselves more. With an amazing amount of sweat during preseason practice we were well on our way. By the beginning of the year we were playing as well as any team in the country. Instead of resting on last year's success, we were getting superlative performances from senior Derek Anderson and sophomore Ron Mercer. Both were averaging close to 20 points a game and were generally considered to be the best one-two punch in the country. They even had earned a nickname, "Air Pair." But then, suddenly, in January, Derek Anderson went down with a serious knee injury, a tear of his anterior cruciate ligament— one of the worst injuries a basketball player can have. (Ironically, he once had suffered the same injury to his other knee.) When he got hurt it was devastating. It was a blow to Derek, who not only was going to lose the rest of his senior year but also potentially a career in the NBA, and a blow to our team as well. Derek's injury deflated everyone, myself included. Was our season over? Were all the dreams we'd had going into the season now obsolete? Were we now simply going to postpone our big hopes until next year? These were the questions everyone on the team now had to deal with. My job as the leader was to find a way to alleviate these concerns and show that we still could be successful and reach our dreams. The first thing I told the team was that Derek was going to be fine. I assured them that he was going to get the best medical atten- M