Joe Lapchick was one of the great basketball players in the pre-World War II era and played center for the legendary Celtics. When his 7-year-old son was stricken with polio, Lapchick’s neighbors expressed concern for the boy’s health, but the basketball star was shocked when one of them, in the presence of the sick child, asked if the boy would ever be able to play basketball again.The next day, when he visited the hospital, Lapchick asked his son if he wanted to be a basketball player. The boy said yes, and his father told him that all he wanted was for him to have a happy and normal life, and to give something back to society.
The son eventually recovered and suffered no long-term effects from his illness. Years later, however, he still recalled the words his father had spoken to him that day in the hospital. As the son of a great athlete, he had always imagined that he had to follow in his father’s footsteps. His father’s words, which conveyed a love not conditioned on his son replicating his feats, freed the young boy from the complex that he, too, had to be a sports star. “I recognized that my father had given me perhaps his greatest gift on that morning in Grasslands Hospital. He freed me of the need to please him and gave me the opportunity to fulfill myself.”
Joseph Telushkin is a spiritual leader, author and scholar ranked by Talk Magazine as one of the fifty best speakers in the United States. www.josephtelushkin.com
