Ubuntu or Bust
What Americans can learn from championship basketball.
It was probably 2002. I was sitting at my desk one afternoon when the phone rang. The caller said he was with the Boston Celtics. He was calling because I was a season ticket holder and he wanted to know if there was anything the team could do to improve that experience.
At the time, the team was led by future hall-of-famer Paul Pierce and power forward Antoine Walker. Walker had a lot of talent, though at times he seemed to think the Celtics could succeed with just two scorers. The team had been in a championship drought for 16 years, with no end in sight. They made the playoffs in 2002, but lost to the New Jersey Nets in the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals. Pierce was a rising star, but his team was not yet championship caliber. The first time I saw Pierce play, his rookie year, I had no idea who he was (I wasn’t the kind of fan who followed the draft closely), but I was impressed with his skill. He stood out among his teammates from the very beginning.
Because the person on the phone called me out of the blue, I had no time to prepare an answer to his question. I made some offhand comment about how much I enjoyed going to the games and that I hoped the team would acquire more talent to make a championship run. He thanked me, said that they planned to work on that, and ended the call.
After we spoke, I thought about how I might have given a better answer. I also wondered who the caller was, and reflected on his unusual name – Wyc Grousbeck. It was only later that I learned he and his partners were the team’s new owners.
In 2004, Grousbeck and his group hired a new head coach named Doc Rivers. I remembered seeing Rivers play at the Boston Garden when he was with the Atlanta Hawks and noticing how good he was then, just like I would notice the talent of Paul Pierce years later. Rivers was the Hawks’ rookie point guard during the playoffs in April 1983 when, during a mid-game brawl, Atlanta’s “Tree” Rollins almost bit off the finger of Celtics shooting guard Danny Ainge. I was at that game, sitting in the nosebleed seats, and I had never before or since seen a basketball brawl as crazy as that one. I probably didn’t know about the bite until after the game, and I’m sure I laughed at the Boston Herald’s headline the next day, “Tree Bites Man.”
When Rivers joined the Celtics as head coach in 2004, he brought with him the African philosophy of “Ubuntu,” sometimes translated as “I am because we are.” He spent that first year focused on team bonding, and became a beloved leader, mentor, and role model for the players and remains a hero to the fans. In 2007, the team acquired great talent to join Pierce, in the persons of Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, and in 2008, that big three (along with Kendrick Perkins, Rajon Rondo, and others) beat the Celtics’ arch-rivals, the LA Lakers, to win the NBA championship. They lost to the Lakers in a rematch two years later, and did not win again until last week.
Danny Ainge (he of the bitten finger) had a lot to do with the 2024 Celtics’ team’s victory. When he was the Celtics’ General Manager, he drafted Brown and Tatum. He also hired Brad Stevens as head coach. Stevens took over as GM when Ainge left, and made the trades last year that resulted in some of the best acquisitions in team history – Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, and Derrick White – not to mention bringing back the team’s leader and senior statesman, Al Horford. Stevens saw the wisdom of retaining Joe Mazzulla as head coach, a man who had fallen into the head coach job when his predecessor was suspended and is actually younger than Horford, the oldest player on the team. Even better, Stevens never listened to the critics who thought the team should trade either Brown or Tatum since they hadn’t yet brought another championship to Boston and each of them had much trade value.
What made this current team special is what makes any championship team special – that rare combination of great talent and team chemistry. You could see the chemistry before, during, and after the games. These guys had each other’s backs. They were not only teammates, they were friends, and they all were willing to play selflessly to win that elusive championship banner. Tatum selflessly passing the ball to Brown, and later smiling broadly when Brown won series MVP (for both the Eastern Conference Finals and the NBA Finals). Holiday quietly setting up the other players for baskets and scoring quite a few himself when they needed a lift. Brown, immediately after the decisive game, referring to his teammates as his “brothers.” These players understood the philosophy Rivers had imparted on the 2008 Celtics championship team: “Ubuntu: I am because we are.”
The 2023-2024 Celtics’ bond was unbreakable, although Dallas Mavericks coach, Jason Kidd, tried his best to break it. During a post-game interview early in the series, Kidd went out of his way to declare Brown the best player on the team. It was widely understood, by sports analysts and the Celtics players themselves, that he said it to get under Tatum’s skin, since Tatum is more often thought of as the team’s superstar but had scored fewer points than expected in the early games. Prod Tatum into feeling he had to prove himself so that he would play more selfishly, take more shots, and focus less on looking for the open man. But Tatum, displaying a maturity developed from years of playing for team-oriented coaches and a burning desire to win a championship after years of falling short, didn’t take the bait. He remained happy to support Brown’s stellar play and to shoot only when his own scoring was what the team needed. Ubuntu!
Unity. Camaraderie. Selflessness. That’s what it takes to win championships. That’s what it takes to be great.
Although I’m oversimplifying, it’s not too big a stretch to say that there are two types of people in this world: dividers (Jason Kidd) and uniters (Rivers, Mazzulla). Dividers bring that “divide and conquer” mentality through which they try to weaken their opponents. Uniters bring that “all-for-one and one-for-all” mentality through which they try to solidify and strengthen their teams. As one would hope, this time the prize went to the uniters. The divider lost because this Celtics team was too cohesive to allow someone to turn them against each other. They would not succumb to an opponent’s attempt to stir up internal team rivalry. They hung together, helping each other score points, and picking each other up when they were down. Through their unity, they made the Celtics great again.
What is true for a sports team is also true for a business, a family, and even a nation. We hear a lot these days about how America has become increasingly polarized. We even hear people entertain the prospect of another civil war. It’s not difficult to see how our internal divisions, provoked and exploited by both foreign and domestic actors, are already weakening America internally and on the world stage. It is much harder to see how we can resist the powerful forces of division and come together as one people.
But if we truly want to remain a great nation — remain strong economically, maintain our international alliances, and live up to our ideals of liberty and justice for all — Americans must work together to seek out common ground, to abandon the extremes and move closer to the center, and to renounce any rhetoric that suggests that America’s greatness can and should be achieved through unlawful, violent means. We must insist on finding and preserving what unites us and rejecting what divides us. We must stop listening to the dividers who hope to weaken America so that they can achieve their own political and personal ambitions, and instead throw our support to those whose vision, like our Founders' vision, is of “a more perfect union.” That is now our great national imperative. The consequences of failure are dire.
Ubuntu.
