Jimmy V

It's the start of basketball season, and that means the Men's and Women's Jimmy V Classic. I love it.

You should know who Jim Valvano is. If you don't, look it up yourself because I couldn't do him justice. The short is that he coached NC State to a National Title in basketball, perhaps winning the biggest upset in the history of the final four - bigger than Duke over UNLV.

He died of cancer, but before he did he left us with the greatest speech of at least the last 20 years, perhaps the most memorable since Martin Luther King Jr.'s on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. His words "Don't give up, don't ever give up" water my eyes just typing them.

Check out The Jimmy V Foundation.

You can listen to his entire ESPY speech here.

Here are some highlights, but you really should read & listen to the whole thing here:

"I can't tell you what an honor it is, to even be mentioned in the same breath with Arthur Ashe. This is something I certainly will treasure forever. But, as it was said on the tape, and I also don't have one of those things going with the cue cards, so I'm going to speak longer than anybody else has spoken tonight. That's the way it goes. Time is very precious to me. I don't know how much I have left, and I have some things that I would like to say. Hopefully, at the end, I'll have something that will be important to other people too....

It's so important to know where you are. And I know where I am right now. How do you go from where you are to where you wanna be? And I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal. And you have to be willing to work for it.

...And...that screen is flashing up there thirty seconds like I care about that screen right now, huh? I got tumors all over my body. I'm worried about some guy in the back going thirty seconds, huh? You got a lot, hey va fa napoli, buddy. You got a lot.

I just got one last thing, I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have. To spend each day with some laughter and some thought, to get you're emotions going. To be enthusiastic every day and [as] Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Nothing great could be accomplished without enthusiasm" -- to keep your dreams alive in spite of problems whatever you have. The ability to be able to work hard for your dreams to come true, to become a reality.

...I know, I gotta go, I gotta go, and I got one last thing and I said it before, and I'm gonna say it again: Cancer can take away all my physical ability. It cannot touch my mind; it cannot touch my heart; and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.