The Campbell Academy Blog (35)

Reductive Finitude

When I was a teenager, I was a basketball player. (Yawn, he's told us this a billion times before).

In my second year as a basketball player, I was lucky enough to be captain of my school team and we were a famous basketball school (if there ever is such a thing in Scotland).

We had a pedigree, a long history of winning national trophies at basketball; in fact, in one of the years I was at school, we had a team in every single national Cup final, boys and girls that it was possible to have, we were that dominant as a basketball school for reasons that may come up in a different blog which are also fascinating.

So, in my first year as captain, in one of the early rounds of the Scottish Cup (which we were obviously destined to win because we were St Columba's High School), we were drawn to play Alness Academy.

Feel free to do our Google Maps from my hometown in Gourock to Alness if you like, but I can tell you it's a f*cki*g long way.

In those days in a minibus from school, it was seven hours.

And so, we trundled up there in a minibus full of the joys of spring, a full day off school, packed with packed lunches and treats and snacks to hammer the highlanders, teach them a lesson about what it was like to be sophisticated and culturally more aware and return back on to the next round on our domination of the Scottish Cup.

We got humped.

It turned out that Alness Academy was about to become a hotbed of basketball because of one guy who was fascinated by it, well-trained, motivated, and a brilliant coach.

They created a generation of basketball players who would beat almost anybody; the other reason is that I have two Scottish Cup loser medals from the finals and also the reason why I never won the Scottish Cup in any of the years I played.

The following year, after the 'hammering in the Highlands, ' we met them in the Scottish Cup final halfway between in Perth.

It was a much tighter affair; in fact, going into the last three minutes, we were two points up, and then I committed my fifth foul (as captain) and was 'fouled out' or sent off, as you would say in football, I spent the final three minutes sat behind the stands.

We lost by two points.
It was after that game that my coach came to me and said, "Why don't you carry this bag of sweaty strips since you don't have the Scottish Cup to carry".
And so, what is the point of all of this?

The point is that I spent my teenage years in a finite sport; you won or lost, and if you lost, it was disastrous (I missed a game-tying shot in my first-ever international against Ireland the year after - another finite disaster I was devastated for weeks).

In those days, I couldn't get my head around the process versus the outcome.

It didn't matter what the outcome was; I was playing for Scotland, travelling to different places, and making friends and memories of which I would never know, but at that stage, it was dominated by the outcome.

We went to London as an under-15s Scottish basketball team to play at the Kingston Arena, which at that time was the biggest basketball arena in the United Kingdom.

There were thousands of people there, and there were lasers, spotlights, and 'Fanfare for the Common Man'.

We were sponsored by 7 UP, for f*ck's sake.

All about the outcome.

We got battered by 20 points.

It was awful.

On the train home, the coaches were writing in our souvenir programmes and telling us to be proud of what we've achieved as Scottish basketball players, but as boys of that age, we couldn't see it.

It's taken me decades to understand the difference between process and outcome, as well as the difference between infinite and finite (beautifully explained by Simon Sinek in The Infinite Game).

It's why when I went to Germany with one of my best friends and then my son, the results really didn't matter.

Maybe it's easy for me to say that as a Scottish fan who knows that we are terrible and will be unlikely to do anything to get past the group stages of a major tournament, but what I know is that when I tell people about it now, results didn't matter. It was everything else that mattered because I was playing an infinite game. I was going to create memories with my son that he will remember for the rest of his life (and so will I).

I'll go again if I can and again if I ever get the chance, and I don't give a sh*t whether we get out of the group stage or not if we qualify for another tournament.

I'm obviously writing this today to reference what happened last night.

I surprised myself by jumping up and cheering when Cole Palmer scored because I'm not really an England fan (I'm a Scotland fan), but I was staggered through this tournament to watch finite England fans throw rubbish at the coach, who has qualified England for two major championship finals in the last four (and a semi-final).

England might never get here again, and they certainly might not if they change coach.

I reckon Gareth Southgate was playing the Infinite game.

I reckon nobody else noticed.

"In order to be prepared to win, you have to lose" (And ultimately, you always lose).