2019 is a just a couple of days away so I will already greet our readers a Happy New and Prosperous New Year.
But actually my subject matter for this piece is more of explaining the need and importance of having a new attitude this coming year. More so in the light of some recent happenings in the world of sports that show what I mean, having been long an HR practitioner and organizational development and team building facilitator, I always anchor my talk and programs on what I call life’s winning combination, skills and attitude.
I am sure that for basketball fans, both the NBA and the PBA, you know what has happened to Carmelo Anthony in the NBA and Terrence Romeo in the PBA, and for social media users, the video of young taekwondo champion from Ateneo, Joaquin Montes, who was involved in a bullying incident inside his school says it all.
Carmelo, a very good scorer and batchmate of LeBron James in the NBA draft 16 years ago I think has been bouncing from one team to the other without winning any title yet and his last team this season, the Houston Rockets simply dropped him from the team saying Carmelo does not agree with the designated role and playing time for him in the Rockets’ rotation.
I have watched on YouTube various sports talk shows that tackled this issue with Carmelo and the consensus is the problem lies with the player who refuses to accept a secondary role even as he has aged already and so far has failed to lead any of his past teams to a title. Well or one, I do not look at Carmelo as a leader even way back and one coach said Carmelo says he wants to lead the team but he just cannot because he is not one.
Ego is the main culprit it seems or this guy.
Actually if you look further back in NBA history, New York’s Latrell Sprewell was another example of a player with very good basketball skills but unfortunately was not blessed with the right attitude that when offered a multi-million dollar contract he refused saying he had a family to feed, in short, he believed that the offer was not worth his skills.
Locally, Terrence, a very good one on one player, found himself traded to San Miguel Beer fom TNT, supposedly upon the request of the majority of the TNT players including the superstars, saying he was disturbing the team chemistry with his attitude. Well, the guy is a scorer and that is what he will do inside the court but then when you are playing with a team that has other scorers as well and credentials maybe even better than him like Jayson Castro, then he has to adjust.
From what I read, Terrence has had fights with a lot of his TNT teammates and how it will turn out in SMB where there are a lot of equally good point guards and scorers too, a lot of PBA fans will be waiting to find out for sure next season.
Again, it is clearly an attitude problem on the part of Terrence and I hope somebody is able to pound some sense in his head if he wants a longer career in the PBA, more so that he now has a child.
Now talking about Montes, the pint-sized bully Ateneo high school student, he is a blackbelter in taekwondo but evidently, he only absorbed the skills training but not the attitude part. At least from what I have seen and heard in the videos where he was the star, suddenly he has found himself a social media superstar but on the negative side.
In the end, Ateneo, mindful of the public backlash and how it can affect the school’s reputation, had no choice but to dismiss the boy from school while the Philippine Taekwondo Association has supposedly banned him from any PTA-sanctioned event and might see himself even stripped of his blackbelt title. An older brother is supposedly the same and I saw a video of him being ganged up by a group.
All of these points out something basic that I have been espousing, people should put more emphasis on developing the proper attitude than just focusing on the skills. One can develop skills with the proper attitude but skills without the right attitude will not be good at all. The athletes I cited above are all good examples of what I am saying.
So when the New Year comes, not just them but all should have a Happy New Attitude.