you go down swinging, get up analyzing and move forward preparing. I remember him saying that to me, remember it sounding like some locker room nonsense. some arbitrary hype talk, the thing you say to rally after a loss, the cheap cliche. what's funny is in the years since, in the life that followed the black hole that was professional sports, even if it was some empty tirade, the sentiment rings true. a lot of life we interact with this process backward, afraid to fail, we prepare, analyze and react. trouble is you don’t learn much from zero, its tough to get the equation flowing with nothing. life is about the abrupt stop signs, the speed bumps, the accidents. you take the mess in stride, you figure out what went wrong and you work towards correcting the mistakes. at some point, hopefully an early point, you learn to embrace failure, because nothing is a worse teacher than success. find a man who’s never done anything wrong and ill show you a man who’s never taken a risk. find the man who’s never taken a risk and ill show you a man who’s never accomplished anything. I learned that from him, that grumpy old fuck who never felt at home anywhere but within arms reach of a sheet of ice. screaming and yelling at a bunch of young men. he taught me the only lesson I’ve used every day since. he taught me how to fail, taught me that failure wasn’t a stain, failure was the only cleanse.