I’m a Yankee fan.  As baseball is my hobby, they’re a good team to root for because they make the hobby a mostly pleasant experience.  They win a lot.  I’ll admit that I’ve become a pretty fair weather enthusiast.  If they’re losing big time, I turn it off.  If they’re doing poorly in one inning, I’ll switch the channel and surf for a few minutes.  Life’s hard enough.  Why should I be bummed out while participating in my favorite hobby?

Over the last few years since the great Yankee clubs of the late 90s through 2001, my Yankees have been a bit harder to watch, so I’ve watched them a bit less.  Why suffer?  I got very used to winning back then and it was a hard feeling to give up.  Who doesn’t like to win?

This past weekend they were great fun to watch once more.  In baseball, the home team bats last.  If the score’s tied in the 9th inning or in extra innings,  and if the home team scores a run, the minute they do, the game is over.  It’s called a “walk off”.  You score and ‘walk off’ the field.  Since the Yankees were playing at Yankee Stadium, they were the home team.

A good solid Minnesota team was in town.  The Yankees won 3 games in a row, each one in a walk off.  The first, Melky Cabrera won with a basses loaded single in the 10th inning, the second, A-rod won with a homer in the 11th, and the third, just yesterday, Johnny Damon won with a homer in the 9th.  This hadn’t happened since 1972.

I was in pig heaven.  It absolutely made my weekend.  I hung in there with my boys as they pulled out 3 great victories and ended up feeling like I’d done it myself.  As a team, I believe they turned a corner.  They re-found their will to win.

It got me to thinking about this concept.  A will to win.  What is it?  What is it made out of?  How do I get me one?

It certainly goes beyond the individual players, the team, the organization.  It’s a spirit really – a spirit that comes in and just kinda takes over the moment.  One team gets it and the other one don’t.  I felt sorry for Minnesota.  They were a good team, nearly as good as the Yankees, but in the end result, they lacked it – the will to win.  They came oh so close – their great player Joe Mauer tried mightily to get them there, but couldn’t.  And in the end they too made a kind of history.  They lost 3 walk offs in a row.

We’ve all seen this will to win exemplified in great teams – the Boston Celtics in the Red Auerbach days, the Montreal Canadians, the 64 Olympic U.S. Hockey Team, The Green Bay Packers of Vince Lombardi, and of course the winningest team of all sports, the Yankees.  Even the Red Sox beat the curse and rediscovered after decades of frustration, this dogged determination.

Individuals too have exemplified this power throughout sports history.  Tiger Woods, Joe Montana, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Edwin Moses, Wilma Rudolph, Michael Phelps, Bob Gibson, Yogi Berra, Michael Jordan.  And the list goes on and on…

What was it that they all had beyond their amazing skills, athleticism and talent?  They had this determination to be the best plus the willingness and the drive to do whatever it took to do so.  Through their skills, their work ethic and their sheer ability to determine their own fate, they each had the ability to lift a team up on his or her back and carry it forward to victory.  It is a willingness to go beyond the human possibility and touch the divine – an understanding, really, that “I can do it” or as our President once claimed, “Yes we can”.

I truly believe that this will to win is in each of us.  It is a higher part of the human spirit.  Yes, for some it has been beaten down to insignificance, but just like the Yankees, it can be rediscovered.  It has to do with believing in ourselves, but believing in ourselves comes from putting the work in, the blood sweat and tears, intelligently choosing something to do in the first place that lies within our talent gift and then staying with it with unfaltering determination until we become really good at succeeding.  Then, I believe, that a higher power takes over once we have taken these human footsteps.

It is the will to win.  The willingness to sacrifice everything in the moment to achieve the goal.  It is Derek Jeter diving headfirst into the stands to catch a foul ball in the World Series and coming out bloodied, but with the ball.  It is the willingness to play totally in the moment of now with no thought to the past or future – only full blast nowness.

I once played football with a great athlete.  Our team that year had a will to win so great that not only were we undefeated all year, but we were also unscored upon.  No team scored a single point against us all year.  In the huddle, this boy/man, our quarterback, radiated this will to win.  He was divinely skilled, he was a solid ego-less leader and he was football smart beyond all the rest of us.  The rest of us were regular humans, good athletes, skilled players, but our association with this one player who had this Will made us all better, made us believe in ourselves more, made us all play better because we saw his mighty example.

As the season went on and our confidence in ourselves grew, we simply became more and more unbeatable every game.  We had the will to win and we never lost it.  We had that perfect balance between hard work and expectation.  We saw ourselves as champions and so we were just that – champions of an extraordinary measure.

It was a life lesson I shall never forget.  I’ve tried to capture it in my bottle ever since – sometimes successfully, sometimes missing.  This last weekend, I witnessed and felt it once again with the Yankees.  There’s nothing quite like it.  It is our human spirit exceeding beyond itself.  It is a visit with the divine.

Go Yanks.  Go people.