![]() ![]() Around noon, things got quiet on the New York floor, and I got overly drowsy. My job was to man the phone all day during trading hours and call cotton prices quotes from New York into Mr. It was a Friday morning in June, and I had been out literally all night with a bunch of my friends. I was still pretty fresh out of college, and my mentality, unfortunately, was still firmly set on fraternity row. Heck, in that town, waking up was an excuse to party. It has the Strawberry Festival, the Jazz Festival, the Sugar Bowl, Mardi Gras, and just about every other excuse for a party that you can ever imagine. Now, New Orleans is an unbelievable city. I was working in New Orleans for one of the greatest cotton traders of all time, Eli Tullis. The next time the dragon of failure reared his ugly head was in 1978. It can stay with you for a very long time. Standing in the middle of that ring and getting that trophy, I still remember looking around for those two little kids who had run me into that bathroom back in the 6th grade, because I was going to knock their blocks off. I nearly won the Memphis Golden Gloves my senior year in high school and did win the collegiate championship when I was 19. So in the 10 th grade, I took up boxing where suddenly everyone was my size and weight. Well, that passed, and I kept trying team sports, but I was just too small to really compete. I ran out of the gym as fast as I could only to bump into two of the opposing team’s players who proceeded to laugh and tease and ridicule me. I had missed five shots, and the other team erupted in jubilation that I had not scored. Every time I got the ball, the entire other team would rush towards me, and on top of that, that afternoon I was the greatest brick layer the world had ever seen. Going into the fourth quarter, our team was well ahead, Coach Clark inserted me and thus, began the worst eight minutes of my life up until that point. The problem was that Coach Clark said it loud enough that every person in the stands could hear it as well as every member of the opposing team. So in the second half the coach directed all the kids to throw me the ball when I went in, and for me to shoot so that I would score. It was the last game of the season and I was the only player on the squad that had not scored a point all season. I played on our basketball team, and I was the smallest and youngest kid on the team. My first real failure was in 1966 in the 6th grade. ![]()
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