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Awards

Award: To give or order the giving of something as an official payment, compensation, or prize to someone; a prize or other mark of recognition given in honor of an achievement. From Anglo-Norman French awarder, variant of Old French esguarder “consider, ordain.”

Americans believe strongly that awards motivate people to perform. The College Football All-America Team is an honor given every year to the best college football players at their respective positions. The Heisman Memorial Trophy is awarded annually to the outstanding player. The Lombardi award is awarded annually to the best college football lineman or linebacker.

The College Basketball All-America team is made up of those players voted the best in the country by the sports press. The Naismith Award is given to the country‘s most outstanding college player.

The Cy Young Award is given to the best pitchers in Major League Baseball, one each for the American and National League. The Most Valuable Player Award, commonly known as the MVP, is the oldest individual award.

The Academy Awards, known as the Oscars, are given annually for excellence of cinematic achievements, in more than a dozen categories. The ceremony is televised live in over 100 countries. The Grammy Awards recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry. The annual presentation ceremony features performances by prominent artists.

Valedictorian is an academic title given to the student delivering the closing statement at a graduation ceremony. Valedictorians are typically the student with the highest academic ranking in their graduating class.

The National Honor Society recognizes high school students demonstrating excellence in the areas of scholarships, leadership, service, and character. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, an academic honor society with 280 chapters, promotes excellence in the liberal arts and sciences at the university level.

American children receive trophies for placing first, second and third in sports competition. In recent years it has become common for all participants to receive some kind recognition for participation alone, including even trophies.

Elementary school students continue to receive stickers or stars on their homework assignments – shiny, glow in the dark, big in size – in order to acknowledge good work.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military honor in the U.S., awarded for personal acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty. The medal is awarded by the President in the name of U.S. Congress.

October 2012. Apple CEO Tim Cook: “Apple is having another incredibly successful year, thanks to all of the hard work by you and your teams. Your focus and dedication to making the best products on earth is what makes Apple such an incredible place. To recognize the efforts that made this amazing year possible, I’m happy to announce that we’re extending the Thanksgiving holiday once again this year. We will shut down with pay on November 19, 20 and 21 so our teams can spend the whole week with their loved ones.”

Joe Louis and Max Schmeling

Not many people know of the great friendship between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, at their time the world’s greatest boxers.

June 19, 1936. In famed Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. The American Joe Louis versus the German Max Schmeling. Their first of two fights. Louis undefeated 24-0 and never knocked down, hits the canvas in the twelfth round. The fight is over.

Round 12 starts at 27:27. At 29:27 Louis is defenseless. He goes down. The referee ends the fight. Schmeling rushes over to help Joe Louis. Schmeling stays with Louis all the way over to his corner of the ring. Schmeling’s people have to literally pull him away from Joe Louis.

Among the attendees of the fight was Langston Hughes, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a noted literary figure. Hughes described the national reaction to Louis’ defeat in these terms:

“I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”

Poet and author Maya Angelou, recounted her recollection. A young Angelou had listened to the fight over the radio in her uncle’s country store in rural Arkansas. While Louis was on the ropes,

“My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another black man hanging on a tree …. this might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than the apes.”

June 22, 1938 – two years from the day Louis had won the world heavyweight title – the fighters meet once again in a sold-out Yankee Stadium in New York City.

Louis defeats Schmeling in the very first round. Knowing what a true and loyal friend Schmeling was to become to Joe Louis at the end of Louis’ life, it breaks your heart to see how helpless Max Schmeling was in the final seconds of this first round.

After retiring from the ring, Schmeling purchased a Coca- Cola bottling and distribution franchise in Hamburg in 1948, the first in Germany after World War II.

Schmeling reached out and developed a friendship with Louis after their boxing careers ended and provided financial assistance to his former foe in the 1950s. He also paid for part of the funeral arrangements when Louis died in 1981. Max Schmeling was one of the pallbearers.

“It wasn’t until after World War II that I saw him again,” Louis said in his autobiography. “We hugged each other and we’re real friendly and kept in touch by phone.”

The battles between Louis, a black man, and Schmeling came to symbolize for some the coming struggle between Hitler’s Third Reich and the Allies in World War II. Although Hitler had praised Schmeling after the first fight, Schmeling was not an admirer of the German leader and refused to join the Nazi party.

Schmeling, who served as a German paratrooper in World War II, later received an award from the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation for risking his life to hide two Jewish brothers during the Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked and destroyed by Nazis.

The boys, Henri and Werner Lewin, made their way to the U.S., where Henri became a hotel owner. Schmeling kept his act of courage secret. Henri Lewin revealed it at a dinner honoring the former champion in 1989:

“He risked his life for us. Our lives weren’t worth a penny,” Lewin said in a 2002 interview with the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California. “I said, ‘If this is a Nazi, he’s a good Nazi. But I want you to know one thing: I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it wasn’t for this Nazi.'”

Max Schmeling never joined the Nazi Party.

August 9, 1973. Legendary boxers and great friends, Max Schmeling and Joe Louis meet in New York, as Schmeling arrives for visit.

This History Channel documentary is well worth watching.

Agassi hacks Becker

Two of the greatest tennis players of all time. Looking for any advantage, no matter how slight, in order to gain an edge. Andre was a very careful observer.

Why Every NBA Team Needs an Australian

The safest way to win an NBA championship is to land one of the league’s few unstoppable players. But even superstars require the right surrounding parts. They are the Australians. And every team in the NBA could use one.

Australian players tend to be the opposites of most American players. They don’t seek superstardom. They actively avoid attention. They excel in the egoless roles that most players reject.

Aussies can be so obsessed with their teams, in fact, that individual awards make them uncomfortable. They want to win more than anything else. “The kids in the U.S. are told from the time they’re 12 years old that they’re the next Michael Jordan.”

VW is not Alfa Romeo

When a car is designed for the German market the focus of both maker and consumer is primarily on technical requirements, features and overall performance.

A Volkswagen, for example, is not an Alfa Romeo. Functionality is more important to Germans than beauty and elegance. Sachlichkeit – dispassion, objectivity, relevance, practicality – trumps emotions. As the Germans would say: Ordnung ist das halbe Leben – literally: order is half of life.

German children learn at an early age, in grammar school, that a presentation should be objective, unemotional and topic-oriented. They should speak in an even tone. Be objective, not emotional. The agenda and structure should be clear.

The German understanding of order is taught early, reinforced throughout one’s life, and then passed on to the next generations.

Soccer Teacher

In order to coach at the highest level of German professional soccer one needs a license, which is obtained after completing rigorous theoretical and practical training. Once obtained, the professional soccer coach is granted the official title of Fussballlehrer, literally soccer teacher. Not coach. Instead teacher.

Like a school teacher who has given a test, the soccer teacher (the Germans use the term Trainer) has very few levers during the match to influence its outcome. He must hope that his players apply during the match all that they learned and practiced.

The coach (formally Fussballlehrer, informally Trainer) and his staff work with their players on technique, practice specific strategies and set plays, try out different formations. But once the match begins the coach can make only three player substitutions, can to a limited degree yell certain instructions to the players, has only a few minutes at halftime to provide instruction. In the end, therefore, it is the players who have to know how to react to the opposing team.

The coach is practically a bystander. In fact, the rules of soccer prevent too much communication between coach and players during the match. Again, the coach is like a school teacher, who can only hope that his students have paid attention in the classroom, have done their homework conscientiously, and will apply during the examination what was taught to them.

Baseball and pitch-calling

Steve Krah of the Elkhart Truth (newspaper in Indiana) wrote online: „More and more, catchers at the college and high school levels are seen peeking — or even staring — in the dugout to get the sign from a coach.

While some programs let their pitchers and catchers manage their own games, many others — especially NCAA Division I schools — take that off the battery mates’ plates.

Notre Dame pitching coach Chuck Ristano calls nearly every pitch as well as pick-off tosses and pitch-outs and sets the defense for the Irish.

`I want (the pitcher and catcher) to have some element of ownership in the game, but the reality is we have access to a lot more information than the kids do (like tendency and hitter spray charts),’ Ristano said. `We just want them to focus on executing their pitch.`’

Notre Dame employs a numbers system that is flashed to the catcher, who then consults a wristband chart that suggests which pitch and part of the strike zone to throw the pitch.“

LeBron James calls plays

Sunday, May 10, 2015. Sports Illustrated online.

„Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James says head coach David Blatt wanted him to inbound the ball on the final play of Sunday’s Game 4 but he overruled the coach. Instead, James hit a game-winning jumper as time expired to give the Cavaliers an 86-84 series-tying win.

`To be honest, the play that was drawn up, I scratched it,’ James told reporters. `I just told coach, Give me the ball. We’re either going to go to overtime or I’m going to win it for us. It was that simple.

`I was supposed to take the ball out,’ James continued. `I told coach, There’s no way I’m taking the ball out, unless I can shoot it over the backboard and it goes in. I told him, Have somebody else take the ball out, give me the ball, and everybody get out of the way.’”

Coachable

To be coachable means to allow yourself to be coached: accept criticism, want to improve, do the necessary extra work in order to perform better, listen to the coach. Critical feedback – regardless of how clear, fair, diplomatically communicated – is only helpful if the team member is willing to work with the coach.

When judging talent American sports coaches look carefully at the willingness and ability of a player to be coached, their coachability. American managers are no different. The ideal player (employee) is one who is self-critical, identifies their own weaknesses, takes the initiative by looking for ways to improve, and communicates all of this to their boss.

American team members want a team lead who can coach. American managers want employees who are coachable.

“Coach me“

Americans expect to be coached by their team lead. If the team lead has accurately identified weaknesses in a team member, and has communicated them clearly, fairly and diplomatically in a feedback talk, then it is expected that the team lead then coach her „player.“

Just as a basketball coach will take extra time with a player after practice to work on dribbling or shooting skills, so too a good manager in the American business context will take the time to explain to the employee how to perform certain tasks better: give presentations, write reports, perform calculations, attach the part to the machine, handle customer issues, work with external suppliers, and manager their own team. The list is endless.

If the team lead, however, is not in a position to coach her player directly – due to time constraints or perhaps she is not a master of the skill herself – then she should, at a minimum, know where to send that team member in order to be coached, taught, instructed, advised.

Coach. Player. Americans want to be coached. American sports coaches are deeply involved in how their players play.