The Things That Stayed

Last Friday was one year since my stroke. The sentence sits there without drama. No exclamation point needed. Just a date that split my life into before and after. Doctors called it minor. I call it an interruption.

A stroke doesn't hand you wisdom. It gives you clarity. Everything abstract collapses into something you can actually see. The questions rearrange themselves. You stop asking what works and start asking what lasts. I've spent the past year looking backward and into the future to determine where to orient my steps. Not with nostalgia. More like someone trying to understand what shaped him before he had words for it. Not the achievements or the credentials. The influences that trained my compass before I knew I was being trained.

One of those influences was a book. A Season of Life showed up in my world without fanfare. I read it. Something settled. Then I started giving it away. Christmas after Christmas, I bought extra copies. Not for players. Not for clients. For friends. For parents. For people raising kids or carrying responsibility or trying to figure out what success was supposed to mean. I wasn't recommending it. I was passing something on. Only later did I understand why.

Football was my sport identity. Not tennis. Football. That's where my sense of self first connected to effort, contact, hierarchy, belonging. It was physical in a way nothing else was. Honest. You couldn't fake being ready. You showed up prepared to absorb impact or you didn't belong on the field.

My high school football coach, Bill Tighe, made this clear on day one of practice. He'd gather us together and say, "The first day of practice I want you to bring your cup, your mouthpiece, and intestinal fortitude which cannot be purchased at any price." No metaphor there. Everyone understood. Protect what you can protect. Prepare your body for contact. Then there was the third requirement. The one you couldn't buy at any store. The one that only showed itself when you were tired, uncomfortable, scared, or hit harder than you expected. That idea lived in my body long before it lived in my head.

Football taught me some qualities can't be claimed in advance. They don't show up in conversation or on paper. They reveal themselves under pressure. When something asks more of you than you planned to give. That's why A Season of Life landed the way it did.

Football isn't an obvious place to look for reflection or tenderness or love without irony. It's a culture designed to armor you up. To endure rather than articulate. To put anything soft below the demands of the group and the scoreboard. I knew that world from the inside. I trusted it. Which meant I trusted the disruption when it appeared there.

The book doesn't reject football values. Discipline stays. Commitment stays. Sacrifice stays. What changes is what those qualities serve. Toughness stops being the point. It becomes a tool. Fortitude redirected toward something more durable than winning a season. I don't think I recognized how rare that framing was at the time. I just knew it felt earned. Calm. Unforced. It took excellence seriously without confusing it for meaning.

A stroke tests what actually steadies you. When momentum disappears and the future feels less elastic, you notice what remains when nothing's being asked of you. The influences that mattered before urgency tend to matter more after it. I've looked back over this year and that book keeps surfacing. Not because it taught me how to coach or lead or parent. Because it named a version of success I'd already been circling without fully seeing it. Success measured less by accumulation and more by alignment. Less by visibility and more by coherence.

Giving that book away now feels less like generosity and more like confession. It was my way of saying, quietly, this is the direction I'm trying to walk. Even when I don't always manage it. Especially then. This isn't about lessons learned or silver linings. I'm not interested in turning a medical event into a parable. This is about acknowledging the things that shaped me before the interruption and clarifying which ones still deserve my attention after it.

Some influences arrive loudly. Others arrive gently and stay. That book stayed. One year later, with fewer assumptions and a longer pause between questions, I can finally see why.