A Team Win

A Team Win So I know there’s no “I” in “Team” and even the likes of Willard “Mitt” Romney knows you can find the first person singular in “Win.” And now that Michael Jordan has made the transition from labor to management I wonder if he’s changed his mind about the “I” thing? Like I’ve shared here before, my dad was a great athlete. And even though the Dalai Lama is always virtually quick to ask if I remain the foremost elite athlete/scribe/DDS in the San Gabriel valley, truth is Dad was a little stingy with his jock DNA. If you don’t count the golf scrambles and recruiting skills that cement foursomes comprised of me, someone with a pulse, and two golf pros with awesome Invisalign smiles, my team sports career expired at the end of a bench in high school. But who knew dentistry would totally get me back on my team game? When I was in dental school, I actually thought the hot little dental assistants in-training from PCC would only slow me down. I know; it makes you wonder about anyone not smart enough to get into dental school…or that maybe being smart has nothing to do with it. All I’m saying is that after I started paying rent and liability premiums to fix teeth, I became a born again team player. And in my last 360 degree review my co-workers reported that, compared to smoker and calorie-counter born agains, I wasn’t even THAT obnoxious. So these days Team is a beautiful thing. Whether it’s the Celtics or Old Hypocrite Pete Carroll’s Trojans or the folks educating future leaders over at Emperor Elementary, you don’t need drugs when you’re part of an authentic team…because you’re already living the dream. I just spent a week in Oahu with my own TCDC team. We had met a major goal in 2012 and now it was time for some celebration and acknowledgement. And if you travel far only to find yourself surrounded by DDS-types, that’s NOT a vacation. If, on the other hand, you get to spend serious quality time away from the office with folks who’re the closest thing to family (the one you would choose), who have each other’s backs (and mine) like two lawyers bird hunting with former VP Cheney and talk trash the way James Earl Jones does Othello, you know you’re lucky…and should be having one helluva special time. At Pearl Harbor, we toured the USS Arizona Memorial and then boarded the USS Missouri. World War II had begun for the U.S. with the sinking of the Arizona and the loss of 1,177 lives; it ended with signatures on the deck of the Missouri. The ’27 Yankees and the ’95-96 Bulls are considered historically awesome teams; imagine 2700 men working together under the life/death stress of battle on the Missouri. I’m still trying to visualize over 50 sailors working as a unit loading and firing one 2,700 pound shell twenty miles out of a 16-inch gun while the previous shell was still in the air. Don’t know about Michael Jordan, but flying back to LAX and thinking about our tour and seeing my fellow TCDC island travelers, I realized we had plenty of room to grow as a team but we were definitely headed in the right direction. It was clear the “I” in win was just an inconvenient vowel in the middle of a word that only happens when we realize all of us are always better than any of us.