When I was a kid my dad put up a basketball backboard and rim and it was attached to the middle of our garage on the top of our driveway. I used to shoot hook shots and long shots and free throws. The driveway sloped down so I was always shooting up. I would take twenty straight free throws and my goal was to make sixteen which I did from time to time.
I recently saw a video that I watched a couple years ago by Eric Johnson of KOMO News in Seattle, Washington. It's about a guy named Tom Steurey who lives in Eastside, Washington. After he retired at 65 he was at the gym and walked by the basketball court and saw a ball sitting near the foul line. He picked it up and decided to do one hundred free throws and he made 82 of them. He was on his high school basketball team, but that was a long time ago.
He wrote down his numbers on his calendar and started doing it every day as part of his workout and then it became his workout. Sometimes he would shoot 400 in a day and record it on his calendar and then on his computer. He had retired from Boeing and he was a guy who liked numbers.
After a few years he had a bigger goal-he wanted to shoot one million free throws. It took him a total of 17 years and he tracked all his free throws and he made 94% of them which is incredible. He also estimated that going back and forth on the court he walked 1,500 miles. At one point he made 222 shots in a row.
On his 82nd birthday he made free throw number one million in front of friends and family. You can watch the news story online by looking up his name. He said, "I did it for the challenge."
When you retire, what will you do for "the challenge?"
No comments:
Post a Comment