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John Naber became America’s most decorated athlete at the 1976 Summer Olympics held in Montreal, winning four gold medals and one silver medal in swimming while setting four world records.
Naber has been inducted into four Halls of Fame, served on the board of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, carried the Olympic Flag into the 1984 Opening Ceremonies, and was selected to carry the Olympic Flame in four different Olympic Torch Relays.
Following his retirement from competition he has served as analyst, play-by-play specialist or sideline reporter for over 35 different sports, including filing stories from eight Olympic Games. He has worked for all major networks and most cable outlets over the past 25 years.
Naber also serves as chair of the CHARACTER COUNTS! Sports, a project of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. CHARACTER COUNTS! is devoted to sports-based character education that teaches ethics and character development to schools, clubs and other community organizations. He’s written two books – “Awaken the Olympian Within” and “Eureka—How Innovation Changes the Olympics and Everything Else”.
Naber spoke recently at the University of Northern Iowa to over 400 high school leadership students as part of the Pursuing Victory With Honor Summit co-sponsored by UNI, Iowa Health System, CHARACTER COUNTS! in Iowa, the Iowa Games, and the Iowa National Guard. Here were his comments in part.
“I worked for eight years of my life to become the best backstroker on the planet and I was so honored, but I haven’t used that skill once since. When you think about it, there is no inherent value in swimming quickly while on your back. Unless you’re towing a boat to safety, you’re not really contributing to society at large.
“Generally speaking, most people want to be happy and the thing that makes them happy is being able to make a positive difference. That’s why I joined Character Counts… Leadership is significant because of how you choose to use it. There have been very bad people who have been very good leaders and they use their leadership to accomplish bad things.
Most people think that sportsmanship is the ability to finish third with a smile on your face. That’s not it at all. Our goal is to pursue victory, and try to win, but to do so according to the rules… Sports often are a metaphor for life. I mentioned that swimming quickly on your back has no legitimate value in society at large other than to provide some entertainment once every four years. So why are so many people choosing to be involved in sports? Because sports are a metaphor for life. If we work hard and enjoy ourselves, that philosophy applies to the real world. If we follow the rules and don’t get disqualified, that philosophy applies to the real world.
“Vince Lombardi has been quoted as saying, ‘Winning isn’t everything’ and most people think the rest of the quote is, ‘it’s the only thing’. But that’s not what he said. What he really said is, ‘Winning isn’t everything, but the will to win is’ . He didn’t say that winning is everything that matters, he said trying to win is what matters. It doesn’t matter if you don’t win.
“(The modern Olympic Charter) doesn’t have anything to do with beating the opponent, crushing the opposition. (The modern-day Olympic founder) was trying to teach life lessons and we in sport today still have the ability to do exactly that… The Olympic motto means ‘swifter, higher, stronger’. The goal of the Olympics does not say ‘swiftest, highest, strongest’. In other words, improvement is more important than excellence. Improvement is a goal everyone who marches in the opening ceremonies can be successful at. You don’t have to win the gold to be better than you ever were in your life.
“You’ve got people on your team who may never score a single point in the season. Can they be a contributing member of the team? Of course, because they are going to try to improve. You as a leader can help them improve, and they as a walk on can help you improve just by their encouragement and attitude.
“The Olympics used to be amateur…An amateur loves what they do. An amateur stamp collector loves to collect stamps. That doesn’t mean (he’s) bad. It just means they love what they do. So all of you who are not being paid to play sports and are willing to do sports anyway, you’re amateurs.
That’s what I like(d) about the Olympics…Today, you read about Barry Bonds and allegations of drugs, Michael Vick raising dogs. Even referees in the NBA get caught in a scandal and the list goes on and on. The standards are slipping. You’ve got eighth graders being recruited to play basketball in college. You’ve got Little Leaguers lying about their age so their teams can win a title with athletes that are ineligible. You’ve got a hockey coach who was killed by a parent because he didn’t like the fact he had benched his son.
“The Olympic family is not immune. Just within the last three years you’ve got…a skier favored to win lots of gold, didn’t win a single medal and yet he was proud of his Olympic-caliber party style…Amanda Beard, a great swimmer, got herself in the pages of Playboy Magazine…And then the Spanish soccer team, defeated in Beijing at the Olympics, did a poster of their team in Spain and were all squeezing their eyes back pretending as if they were Chinese athletes going to the Olympics.
“They’re making big mistakes. They’re not trying to be evil. They’re just not thinking about character issues…I think it’s Einstein who said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expecting the results to change. If we don’t change what we do, the results won’t change. When you ask one of your friends who got busted for drunk driving after the Senior Prom, ‘Why’d you do it?’ and they say, ‘Well, I didn’t mean to’, or ‘the pressure to win was just so great that I had to cheat’, there’s always a justification for it.
“We all want to be successful, we all want to be rich and want to be popular and most of the bad choices are a matter of temptation. We like the short-term benefits and are unable to see the long-term costs …The rewards become increasingly lucrative. The kind of money available now in professional sports makes the kind of money available 20 years ago seem like chump change…Do you know how much money I made winning the Gold Medal? Zero, zip, goose egg…The compensation in corporate America, same thing. CEOs are being paid such huge financial incentives for performance that the temptation goes up.
“In Olympic sports, which sports do we expect to see performance enhancement drugs? Badminton, synchronized swimming? No. Where’s the money? The money’s in track, the money’s in cycling, the Tour de France. That’s where we get the positive test results because where the temptation is, that’s where it gets harder to live up to the character elements. The rewards are so high that people are willing to do things they normally wouldn’t do...A Nike commercial in 1996 said you don’t win the Silver, you lose the Gold. I talked to an athlete from the 1936 Olympics. I asked how he did. He said he “won” seventh place. That was his attitude. He came home a winner.
“If you are unwilling to lose, soon you will be willing to do anything in order to win. Doesn’t that make sense?...The opposite of sportsmanship is not bad sportsmanship, it’s what I call gamesmanship. Gamesmanship is the desire to win at any cost…Sportsmanship is trying to win on your opponent’s best day. Winning if your opponent is debilitated – clubbed in the leg with a lead pipe—if you coast to victory, it’s not really a victory. Do you feel like you earned anything? No, but if you tried to win on his best day, you both enjoyed the experience…If you walked by my chair and picked up my dropped Gold Medal that said ‘World’s Best Swimmer’ and put it in your pocket, does that make you the world’s best swimmer? No, because you didn’t earn it.
“A competition is where together we seek to discover the answer. It’s like two boys measuring their height standing back-to-back. If one stands on their tippy-toes, the accuracy of the test is inaccurate. So when we go into an athletic competition, it’s not adversarial but rather we are in partnership trying to discover something. Let’s both go looking for the answer and we will discover the real truth as to who is the best runner or swimmer or tennis player or whatever.
“Most people try to rationalize what they do after the fact. If you justify your behavior before you make the decision, if you think in advance ‘what are the consequences of this?’ and I choose to do it anyway, that’s a rational thought. But if you justify what you did after you make the decision, that’s rationalization. That’s basically making an excuse for bad behavior. If you decide in advance what to do on the basis of what should be done, not on the basis of what I’d like to do, you’ll probably make the right choice.
“Character is revealed when the price of doing the right thing is more than we are willing to pay. It’s easy to follow the speed limit when we’re not in a hurry. It’s hard to follow the speed limit when we’re late for a date, right? That’s why the example of sport is so critical because people really, really, really want to win the Gold Medal. I like to think of it as courage. Courage is the ability to behave correctly when it’s really scary, when it’s really costly. John Wooden, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, says ‘Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of knowing some satisfaction.’ Knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming. You’ll be happy if you do the right thing.
“You’re going to face tough choices, you’re going to face difficult decisions and because you’re a leader, people will be watching you and they will be making their decisions on the basis of the leadership they see in you. Are you willing to stand up for character?”
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