By Sid Roberts / Herald Forum
Larry Bird was a Hall of Fame NBA star for the Boston Celtics. His basketball talent was off the charts, and no one worked harder than Bird.
With the game on the line and a few seconds on the clock, you wanted the basketball in Larry Bird’s hands. He was a cold-blooded gamer.
One year he won the NBA three-point competition without taking off his warm-up jacket. He was that good. However, besides the incredible talent for basketball, Bird employed another skill that worked well for his trade. Larry Bird was a trash talker.
Creating a psychological advantage in sports is huge. Many have done it, but Bird did it better than most and he created this competitive advantage with his mouth. His goal, besides being very good, was to wear you down with rhetoric.
Another former Boston Celtic, Bill Bradley, also knew something about verbal gymnastics.
When starting for the U.S. Olympic basketball team in 1964, he wanted some verbal advantage for the title game against our arch enemy the USSR. So, Bradley went to the Russian language professor at his college, Princeton, and learned how to say one phrase in Russian.
Upon the first bit of physical contact with a Soviet player, he shouted the phrase out in Russian so loud everyone on their team could hear: “Hey, big fella … watch out!” Because the Soviet team thought they could call out their plays in Russian, this messed with their minds. The USA won that title game by 13 points and received the gold medal. Bradley went on to star in the NBA and eventually became a U.S. senator.
While verbal assault can work in sports, in life, potty mouth is more of an indication of weakness of character in the mind and soul. What comes out of the mouth is often a mirror of who we really are on the inside. Potty mouth and destructive words are not incumbent of a great leader. My Texas=born grandmother called this kind of talk, vulgar and those who practiced it, “vulgarians.”
The fruit of any great leader is in the breath of thought, self-sacrifice and the humility of mind; and of course the beauty of verbal discourse. Clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. show us well how great leaders can craft words for good. Have we lost our ability to communicate with great words?
Words, especially bad words, and verbal assault, are for dictators not leaders. This kind of verbal offesniveness masks great insecurity. Great leaders let their life, and the fruit of their spirit do the talking.
I thought as a young 7-year-old that it would be cool to use bad words and cuss just like my dad. He was good at it. So, the next time I got mad, cuss, cuss, cuss rolled off my tongue.
The next thing I knew my mother had a bar of Dial soap shoved into my mouth. At least it was a clean bar.
Truthfully, we know much about people by the way they speak. Often the louder someone yells out their position and the worse their potty mouth, the weaker their argument. Great leaders don’t publicly speak evil about people.
St. James spoke in the Bible about how hard it is to control the tongue. He called it a “restless evil and deadly poison.” Yet, for us, it is often a signpost of inner illness that points the wrong way to go. Verbal castigation is abuse and if we are around it, we need to flee.
On the other hand, kind words, helpful words, are like angelic salve that causes people to relax, trust and feel healing. Hearing someone yell or verbally disparage another is like a sucker punch from deadly assailant. When they are done with you, you will be left for dead.
As a baby boomer, my elders used to say, “if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all.” Unfortunately, verbal abuse has become fashionable and so we see it now even in the highest places of leadership.
My argument here is that true leadership comes from a disciplined life which includes a disciplined tongue.
Sid Roberts is Mayor of Stanwood.
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