I hope the Super Bowl is not a blow-out. I like watching a close game, or seeing a great comeback victory. The Seattle-Green Bay playoff game was a classic. The Seattle Seahawks, plagued by turnovers, were down 19-14 with around four minutes to go.
It was rainy and cold and the Packers had outplayed the Seahawks all afternoon. Then quarterback Russell Wilson led the Seahawks to two dramatic scores and a three-point lead; then the Packers tied it with Mason Crosby’s fifth field goal, sending the game into overtime.
At the 3:19 mark in overtime, Wilson threw a pass that dropped perfectly into the hands of Jermaine Kearse for the winning score and a trip to the Super Bowl. And they didn’t even use deflated footballs.
Wilson was so overwhelmed that he sobbed as reporters crowded him. “Just making the plays at the end, and keep believing … we had no doubt as a team.”
What a picture of resilience! The 16-point comeback was the largest ever in a conference title game, all because the Seahawks never quit.
Tenacity and perseverance are critical for success. So is learning from failure. The Seahawks didn’t have a perfect season. They lost four games, including a 24-20 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Nov. 6 that dropped them to 6-4.
The loss to the Chiefs was a turning point, and Seattle now has won eight straight. As offensive tackle Russell Okung stated, “You learn humility from failure.”
Failure is a great teacher. Inventor Thomas Edison invested much time and energy into a particular project. One of his co-workers, after another failed attempt, remarked, “Isn’t it a shame, that with the tremendous amount of work you have done, you haven’t been able to get any results?”
Edison responded, “Results? Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.” (www.quoteinvestigator.com, “I’ve Gotten A Lot of Results!”).
John Maxwell said, “Failure is a price we pay to achieve success.”
The late Tony Gwynn failed pretty often. On Aug. 6, 1999, he stepped to the plate against the Montreal Expos and made another out, the 5,113th of his professional career. If a baseball player made all of those outs consecutively, he would play eight seasons of 162 games each without reaching first base.
Did Gwynn fail himself or his San Diego Padres teammates? No, because earlier in the game in his first plate appearance, Gwynn reached a milestone that at that time only 21 other players in the history of baseball had achieved — he made his 3,000th hit.
Gwynn had four hits in five tries that game. Normally, a good player often fails to hit in two out of three attempts, but makes millions for hitting .333 consistently. (Illustration adapted from Failing Forward by John C. Maxwell, pp. 11-12).
Even Henry Aaron, whom I consider the home run king, struck out 1,383 times, but also had 3,771 hits, including 755 home runs. His career batting average was .305, thus he failed to reach base 70 percent of the time. Yet, he’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Neither Gwynn nor Aaron quit when they failed to reach base. They kept stepping to the plate when it was their turn to bat.
Coach Rick Pitano said, “Failure is good. It’s fertilizer. Everything I’ve learned about coaching I’ve learned from making mistakes.”
Inventor Charles Kettering suggested we must learn to fail intelligently, and gave these suggestions for turning failure into success:
(1) Honestly face defeat; never fake success.
(2) Exploit the failure; don’t waste it. Learn all you can from it.
(3) Never use failure as an excuse for not trying again.
Kettering said, “Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”
Bouncing back from failure takes resilience, perseverance, stick-to-itiveness, and determination to move ahead. Three steps forward and two steps back is still one step gained. Are you resilient? Do you press on? Do you learn from mistakes?
———
[David L. Chancey is pastor, McDonough Road Baptist Church, Fayetteville, Ga. The church family gathers at 352 McDonough Road, just past the department of driver’s services office. Join them this Sunday for Bible study at 9:45 a.m. and worship at 10:55 a.m. Visit them on the web at www.mcdonoughroad.org and “like” them on Facebook.]
