Thursday
With the NBA finals underway, I follow up the story, mentioned last week, about basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal writing “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the Lens of the Epic Poem The Odyssey.” The thesis was for LSU’s Sports Leadership program. Sadly, I don’t have more information so today’s post merely speculates about how he might have applied Homer’s poem.
Early in the poem we encounter two mentor figures, including Mentor himself (!), who are counseling young Telemachus. Actually, the mentors are Athena, who has taken the guise of first Mentes and then Mentor, but that’s the Greek way of saying that the two men are providing god-like advice. A 19-year-old rookie, Telemachus doesn’t know how to deal with his mother’s suitors, who have invaded the house and are squandering his inheritance. He botches his first confrontation with them—let’s call it his debut appearance on the basketball court—as they successfully threaten him and the sympathetic villagers after he calls a village council. At the end of the session, Telemachus cries in frustration.
Simply calling the council is a growth step for him, however, and Mentor seeks to build on this by essentially sending him to the B league. Figuring that he needs to practice leadership in an environment where he can succeed, Mentor advises him to gather a group of youngsters and take a somewhat challenging sea voyage. Telemachus passes the test and also gains confidence and inspiration after talking to two veterans, Nestor and Menelaus. Both confirm that he has promise, and he returns to Ithaka with a new stride in his step.
He also wins the reluctant admiration of the suitors, who have sent out a ship to intercept and kill him. “Friends,” says one of them,
face up to it;
that young pup Telemachus, has done it;
he made the round trip, though we said he could not.
Fortunately from him, his team has just acquired a superstar—his father—who takes over, pushing Telemachus into a secondary role. It’s what he needs, however, to develop his own talent. He recognizes this and embraces the occasion.
Odysseus brings with him a lot of hard-won wisdom. If we think of his journey home as his previous basketball career, everything starts off well before going off the rails. The Aeolus gives him a bag of winds that take him to within sight of Ithaka, but because he has failed to communicate adequately with his teammates, they open up the bag and are blow back to the now-angry wind god.
In the subsequent journey, Odysseus’s desire to try new things, which is the source of his greatness, also gets him in trouble with the cannibalistic Laestrygonians and Polyphemus the cyclops. In both instances, his teammates just want to grab some loot and go but Odysseus’s curiosity pushes him further, getting a number of them killed.
Lessons abound. On the plus side, this same intelligence gets Odysseus out of tight spots (Polyphemus’s cave). On the negative, his cocky trash talk—boasting to Polyphemus about what he’s done—provides bulletin board material for the opposition. Suddenly Poseidon is on his case.
Life in the NBA offers players many of the temptations (drugs, sex, loot) that show up in the poem, where we watch Odysseus struggle to keep his team focused. The Lotus Eaters tempt with drugs and Circe tends with bestial appetites (she turns men into pigs), and the men are fortunate that they have a leader who keeps his eyes on the prize. This trait also saves Odysseus from the Sirens. (“They got some hungry women there and they really make a mess outa you,” as Bob Dylan would say.)
Odysseus knows how to accept coaching, which he gets from Teiresias in the Underworld and from Circe. This allows him to negotiate situations where there are no good options, a situation basketball teams know well. When the Knicks take on the Spurs, will they collapse down on 7’4” Victor Wenbanyama, thereby leaving themselves open to three-point shooters, or defend him with a single player, in which case they will give up easy baskets. Do they go man-to-man or play zone? There will be costs in both cases, but the goal is to win the game. Odysseus chooses to sacrifice six men to the monster Scylla rather than giving up his entire ship to the whirlpool Charybdis.
And then there’s that part of the season where you sink into mediocrity (Circe’s island) and all appears lost. Do you just give up, sitting around moping, or do you do something dramatic. Odysseus, buoyed by a divine sense of mission—Zeus has decreed he must return home—builds a raft and risks the treacherous seas.
Sometimes at such moments we see teams make daring trades, which sometimes work out (Odysseus, after many struggles, reaches the island of the Phaeacians, who endow him with gifts and send him home), and sometimes not (teams sometimes mortgage their future to acquire players that fail to save them from drowning).
Back home, Odysseus must now prepare for the big game. The odds are formidable as Odysseus can field no more than four men (unless one counts Athena) while there are 108 suitors. Nevertheless, despite his age, he possesses remarkable fighting skills, along with the element of surprise. Telemachus, meanwhile, proves a worthy second–Scotti Pippen to his father’s Michael Jordan—and the underdogs win.
While this post has been fun to write, I would much rather have reported on the actual content of Shaq’s thesis. He may have encountered the poem in the many hours of interdisciplinary course work his program required, and I can see how he came up with the idea. I would love to know the specific games, coaches, players, and situations it brought to mind.
