Once upon a time, David Ortiz and Tom Brady didn't fit in. Neither should you.
Take it from two of Boston's most iconic figures. If you ever want to do anything great in life, go get your ass kicked first.
David Ortiz was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame last week, in his first year of eligibility. Earlier this week, Tom Brady officially announced his retirement, shutting the lid on the most prolific career in the history of football.
And with it, we’re reminded of something patently absurd.
Papi and Tom Brady are far and away the two most iconic Boston athletes of my life. And yet, both of them only arrived here because nobody else wanted them.
Let that sink in for a moment.
You know every turn of Brady’s journey from sixth-rounder to fourth-stringer to The Greatest Quarterback Who Ever Lived. But let’s not forget that Ortiz came here in 2003 on real cheap money. The Minnesota Twins were principled in their small-ball ways, and had little use for a guy who could mash home runs but not manufacture them.
That seems so utterly bizarre in hindsight. Let that be a lesson, not just for sports, but for life. To quote a famous Greek philosopher, “Dogs bark at what they don’t understand.”
It’s OK that you’re not everyone’s treasure. In fact, it’s better that way.
Perception is everything. Magic doesn’t happen without a willful audience. Somebody had to believe in Ortiz.
That man was Red Sox GM Theo Epstein, an early adopter of sabermetrics, who was bold enough to accept on-base percentage as a more reliable metric related to run production (and, in turn, winning) than just batting average alone. This was also a pre-Moneyball era. Most of the league wasn’t yet acknowledging what are now commonly-accepted empirical truths about the game.
And somebody had to believe in Brady. You know the story of “The Brady Six” by now. You also know Bill Belichick rarely keeps more than two quarterbacks on his roster. But in 2000, Brady’s rookie year, Belichick carried four, with TB12 at No. 4 on the depth chart. There was a reason for that.
I’ve been around long enough on both sides of the aisle now to confidently say that, whether or not Mo Lewis’ Hit Heard Round the World forced Belichick’s hand, he was going to make that switch from Drew Bledsoe to Brady at some point in that fabled 2001 season. Bill was never much a fan of Drew. It just so happened opportunity came knocking with a battering ram.
Before David Ortiz became Big Papi, before Tom Brady became The G.O.A.T., they had to go get their ass kicked. So what’s stopping you?
Here’s my “get your ass kicked” journey.
Six months before I landed my life-changing gig at ESPNBoston, I was a finalist for a full-time sports reporter job at a local newspaper north of Boston. I’d been freelancing my ass off six days a week, and substitute teaching during the day when I could. I took risks with some unique analytical breakdowns for Boston.com that landed well, beat the Boston Herald on a few breaking news items, and was pretty much everywhere on the Bruins and high school beats. But I never cut my teeth full-time at a small-town daily newspaper, so I wasn’t the right fit for the job.
And yet, one of the world’s most iconic sports media brands trusted me enough to build a high school section, from scratch, in one of the most high-pressure sports media markets in North America.
How crazy is that? you might ask. Believe it or not, this stuff happens way more than you think. I’m far from the only one.
And boy, did I build a brand. It’s hard to get attention on high school sports in Boston, with four iconic pro sports franchises to follow and a general dearth of high-major grassroots talent in every sport besides hockey. And yet, daily traffic to ESPNBoston’s high schools coverage was more than Celtics and Bruins coverage combined. In fact, we out-drew everything except Patriots and Red Sox coverage.
There were a lot of reasons for this success. These are some of the big ones that I carry with me:
We rallied around the towns — New Englanders are fiercely proud of where they grow up, and we put that front and center with everything we do. Fans loved the anticipation of seeing themselves in the nightly crowd shots we crowdsourced across the state every night of state tournament play. They also loved heckling me at games, and bothering my wife and I at restaurants to bitch at me about the latest state poll. It was awesome.
We scoped differently — No major media outlet had ever tried to cover high school sports from a true statewide perspective — even the Globe and Herald, which focus on towns inside the I-495 loop, and only rank Eastern Mass schools in their polls. Massachusetts also didn’t have a true “Mr. Football” award like you see everywhere else in the country. The first time someone saw a school from Springfield ranked ahead of a school from Brockton, townies up and down Route 24 lost their minds. It made great theatre.
We had fun with it — Hard to believe now, but social media as we know it today was still in its early-adopter stage in 2010. We had a great sense of humor on Twitter at a time when most of our competitors were just getting their bearings with social. That great traffic I mentioned didn’t come from visiting the high school page natively. When ESPN revamped its UI across all its sites in 2015 to be more mobile-friendly, they did away with our beautiful landing page, and our high school coverage just became one big infinite blog scroll. But yet, our daily site traffic increased by the thousands, coming almost entirely from links on Twitter.
These were all lessons I kept in my pocket when ESPNBoston shuddered six years later, and I’d become disillusioned with the way the industry was going. I learned a ton of lessons along the way about brand-building, and fell in love with the art and science of marketing. I was all-in on this career pivot.
Hundreds of companies with marketing openings, and dozens of college athletic departments, told me no. But along came Hudl, a sports tech giant I’d been a fan of for a decade, whose video analysis software is used by virtually every high school football program in North America and some of the most iconic European football clubs. They loved my story, my brand-building journey, and offered me a position as a content producer working primarily on their American football market. I’m doing stories at Hudl that I would never have been able to do in my media career. It’s been some of the most rewarding work of my career.
Hudl, one of the most distinguished brands in sports tech the world over, believed in my storytelling and my ability to connect with their core customers. But some laggard sports tech startup struggling to stay afloat didn’t like me because, as one of them told me, “We’re not looking for the next Woj.”
Sensing a pattern here?
In both of these career-defining moves, I had to get told “no” first. As much as it pissed me off, it also forced me to think more critically about my body of work, change the context of my problems, and come back to the table with something different, something eye-opening, something that the next prospective employer couldn’t possibly say “no” to.
Getting your ass kicked is where the real discoveries begin.
Life is messy. Everybody should find a way to get their ass kicked. It’s a great motivator.
Here’s a local “get your ass kicked journey” I love following.
In two decades covering high school football across Massachusetts, I’ve never seen a quarterback like Springfield Central quarterback Will Watson. His highlight reels are something approaching surrealism. He’s a Mini Mahomes. He’s one of the most sought-after quarterbacks I’ve ever followed on the recruiting trail, drawing interest from as far away as Oregon and getting his first FBS offer before he’d taken a varsity snap as a freshman.
But he’s also — how do I say this politely — uh, generously listed at 6 feet. College coaches are, for many reasons, obsessed with size. Unless you’re the next Kyler Murray, being under 6 feet is generally a problem for college football recruiters.
So that’s why I love this story from MassLive’s Gage Nutter back in the fall about what Watson told Ryan Day when he visited Ohio State:
Ohio State football coach Ryan Day asked Central quarterback Will Watson III and his father, Bill Watson, to come into his office last summer.
Will Watson was in Columbus for Ohio State’s passing camp and was invited to a one-on-one session with Day.
Once the door to his office closed, Day got straight to it. He told Watson out of all the prospects that came to Columbus for workouts that summer, he had thrown the ball better than 95 percent of them, but there is an elephant in the room, his size.
Watson is listed at six feet tall, 180 pounds.
Day told Watson that he and the rest of the Buckeyes’ coaching staff was interested in him, but wanted to know how Watson would feel about the program offering another quarterback in his class a scholarship as insurance.
Watson didn’t let Day finish his sentence.
“You can bring in whoever else in the country you want,” he said. “I’m not worried about that.”
Day smiled.
“I knew you were going to say that,” he said.
Watson also dropped this gem after the Golden Eagles won the granddaddy of them all, the MIAA Division 1 State Championship, at Gillette Stadium this past December:
You can’t help but root for people like this. They are the right kind of cocky. Confident without being arrogant. Introspective without being too into themselves.
Sure, Ryan, offer whoever you want. I’m better than them all and I’ll prove it to you.
I hear all the time from educators that today’s generation has a hard time with problem solving. Think about the things you came of age with. With every advancement in technology, there was always some sort of friction built-in that you had to work around.
(Hell, I didn’t have a flip phone until my freshman year of college. You ever remember placing a collect call home from a payphone, hurriedly stating your name as “Hey mom it’s me come pick me up” and hanging up before the charges were accepted?)
Today’s technology is so advanced, so instantaneous, that the elbow grease is withering away. Kids are relying on apps, not their brainpower, to figure out the hard stuff. Coupled with the FOMO factor of seeing all their friends posting on social media about their fabulous lives, it seems like today’s teenager has never been more easily rattled.
These same kids, until now, had never known a life without former sixth-round fourth-stringer Tom Brady as an active NFL quarterback. They also worship superstars like Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Donald and Steph Curry.
And I hope they’re familiar with each one’s “get your ass kicked journeys”.
Because before Patrick Mahomes was Patrick Mahomes, he was just a kid from East Texas whose video-game high school numbers weren’t good enough for the University of Texas.
Aaron Donald is the most terrifying pass rusher the game has seen since at least Deacon Jones, if not ever. And yet, coming out of high school he wasn’t good enough to be anything more than the 35th-ranked defensive lineman in the country.
Steph Curry has transformed basketball forever. He might be the greatest shooter in the history of the sport. And yet, he wasn’t worth more than a preferred walk-on offer at the university where his dad’s number is retired.
It’s almost like you haven’t really lived until you’ve been told “no”.
Any industry in the country — sports, business, healthcare, government, you name it — has a bunch of leaders at the top of the food chain who, at some point in their life, didn’t fit in somewhere. And it forced them to re-evaluate and transform themselves.
Let the no’s pile up. Let them lead you to places you’ve never been to before, in ways you never thought about. In the words of James Joyce, “Failures are the portals into discovery.”
Don’t fit in.
Go get your ass kicked instead.
Adventure is waiting.
Great article!