“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
Beyond the final score
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Tom Osborne, Regal Books, California, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8307-5111-2
Having read Tom Osborne’s earlier book Faith in the Game (Broadway books, 1999) I was looking forward to more wisdom from the person who had been head Football Coach at the University of Nebraska for 24 years.
While it is an interesting book, the subject matter was of less interest to me than the previous book. While Faith in the Game, gave great insights into Osborne’s approach to coaching, this one deals more with his life after retiring as head coach, becoming a Congressman and then returning to Nebraska as Athletic Director.
An early reflection sets the scene: “I have been blessed to take on a wide variety of roles in my lifetime. I have been a professional athlete, a coach, a congressman, a teacher and an administrator. I have been a leader in various capacities a public figure, a father and a husband—and a fisherman”. (Page 14) The book gives the reader the author’s distilled wisdom from his experience of life in those various roles.
While the issues facing the Congressman for the third district of Nebraska are not without significance, they are not at the forefront of my interest! Again Osborne’s philosophy of leadership will interest many but I was looking for more sport.
What was of interest was how he adopted a personal mission statement of “serve and honor God in all” and tried to implement it in all aspects of his life.
I found his argument that he felt his teams were stronger when they included a significant number of players who bought into his mission statement. He was referring to “individuals who seemed not to be as affected by the vicissitudes of athletics, by being cut from the team, or by having their career ended due to injury. These were people who had not only developed their physical skills and their intellectual abilities but had also developed a strong spiritual base. They realized that they’d been given the gifts of athletic ability, of fame, of a certain degree of fortune, and of youth, and they had decided to honor God with what they had been given rather than serve and honor themselves”. (Page 25)
I was fascinated by his conviction based on Luke 9:24, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it” that to be successful in life he needed to be willing to lose his life rather than constantly trying to save it.
I appreciated his honesty in facing the tension between faith and competitiveness. “I wasn’t sure how to square my love of an aggressive sport like football with Jesus’ teachings about turning the other cheek and being humble. Although I didn’t lie awake at night, troubled and sleepless because of this apparent conflict I was bothered by and confused about how these two loves could coexist. I wasn’t sure I could commit to the Christian life, as 1 understood it, and be a competitive athlete”. (Page 36). I would have loved to have seen that theme developed.