Remember the Alamo!

Growing up in Texas, schools made sure we knew Texas history. The most important moment in this state’s history comes as little surprise to most. This key moment always seemed odd to me, however, because it came during a battle at a small mission fort in San Antonio in which the Texans and volunteers lost.

Many Texans can recall the Dallas Cowboys winning the Super Bowl in 1992 and ’93. Because of football’s prominence in the state, they might even be able to recall the New York Giants and Washington Redskins’ Super Bowl victories in 1990 and ’91, respectively. But every football fan knows the common denominator of these four consecutive Super Bowls. Each time, the losing team was the Buffalo Bills.

The most infamous losing streak in all of sport, the Bills reached the pinnacle of their league four straight years and fell flat on their faces.

Most people consider Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player to ever walk the earth. His sophomore year of high school, his coach cut him from the varsity squad. Undaunted, Jordan then dedicated himself to outworking everyone on the court, in the weight room, and in the classroom. He parlayed that work into a college career at North Carolina in which he hit the game-winning jumper in the 1982 national championship. He went on to win six NBA world championships with the Chicago Bulls and five league Most Valuable Players awards.

Jordan once said, “I’ve missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost more than 300 games. I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot 26 times and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Sports are easily quantifiable. You win, you lose. You succeed, you fail. But success from failure occurs in everyday life as well. Personally, I’ve been told to shape up or ship out twice at my current job. Each time I learned something from my failure and turned that aspect into a success. Now, I am my company’s most valuable asset at my level.

Human beings are inherently flawed; therefore, everyone has failed at some point. It might have been at a job interview, or a school exam, or raising your first child. Hopefully, you learned from that failure. You figured out what you did wrong, corrected it, and succeeded on the next opportunity.

It’s not always that simple, though. College football fans know the heartache I’ve experienced over the last decade as an Oklahoma Sooner football fan. OU is the winningest football program since WWII. As a third-generation Sooner, I eat, sleep and breath OU football come every autumn. I was there in 2000 when second-year head coach Bob Stoops led OU out of the doldrums of its miserable ’90s into the national championship at the Orange Bowl. As a high school senior, I experienced OU beating Florida St., 13-2. The next year I formerly became a part of the family tradition by matriculating to the University of Oklahoma.

Over the course of the next nine years, five times I have so believed that we were on the verge of our eighth national title that I made the long trek to a deciding game. Five times I witnessed our season of success turn into utter failure as our team spit the bit and fell flat on its face. OU strung together success after success after success, only to fail in realizing its ultimate goal. It is no small task to get up off the mat time and again to face rebuilding. But that’s what this Sooner football program has done. And that’s what all successful people do.

A single man made it out of the Alamo alive. He escaped through a hidden exit and galloped through the Mexican army, taking a bullet in the jaw in the process. Imagine how Gen. Sam Houston must have felt when the messenger arrived and literally had to hold his jaw up to its broken hinges in order to tell the general that they had lost the Alamo. Gen. Santa Anna and the Mexicans slaughtered every man, woman and child. The savage Mexican army batted babies upon bayonets like volleyballs. How could Gen. Houston tell his outnumbered men to continue the fight when he knows that they put not only their lives in great jeopardy, but also those of their wives and children?

Houston did not run and hide from the failure of the Alamo. Instead, he took a lesson from that defeat. He realized that an outnumbered army could not bunker into a fort expecting to defeat a massive force. So the general led his men in a surprise attack on the Mexicans at San Jacinto, and the Republic of Texas was born under the battle cry of “Remember the Alamo!”

Quoteth Sir Winston Churchill: “Never give in. Never, never, never, never…”