Politely a client asked, "So what motivates the motivator?" I can't legitimately lay claim to any motivational magic beyond the words and concepts shared in this column each week. But since she asked, I thought about it; what does motivate us? In fact, motivation is interpreted in very personal terms. One person's motivation is another's indifference. In your author's environment, it's often found on my office walls.
 
Offices are curious places. In our case where our typical venue is someone's radio cluster, a hotel or on an airplane, few peek inside my office. Yet it is here as a touchstone, a place to decompress, recharge, and craft strategies. But in my office, the walls matter. Take the huge frame hanging directly over my project table: Cal Ripken's signed Orioles jersey #8. Ripken reminds me daily of blue-collar lunch-bucket durability; one's best every day, every week, every season.
 
Nearby on a large ash file cabinet sit a pair of Mohammed Ali's red Everlast gloves, signed in Ali's scrawl. It's not his boxing that inspires me so much as his post-fight career spent battling an insidious affliction, and of the good deeds he's done. Next to Ali's gloves is a basketball with the inscription, "To Tim, go Hoosiers...Bobby Knight." That's a little tougher since, like many, I sort of had a love-hate view of Knight. In later times I've come to respect his relentless inflexibility in developing young players and now see his success for what it was: terminal competitiveness his way that won far more than it lost.
 
The most poignant picture on my walls is a large black & white signed by Joe DiMaggio in his rookie season. The 24 x 30 shows Joltin' Joe as a twenty-something kid with an uncertain look that says, "What's happening to me and how the hell did I get here?" It motivates me because it underscores the euphoria of sudden success and the perils that accompany it. In the opposite corner is one of my favorites: a rare color photo from an old Time magazine with a large close-up of Ted Williams meeting Babe Ruth for the first time at an old timers All Star game at Fenway. In that picture the years had found the Babe but Williams looked much younger than his chronological age. He signed it much later in his life of course. Speaking of Williams there's also a picture over my credenza of Ted Williams hitting his first-ever home run; not at Fenway Park I'm told, but at Holy Cross's Fitton Field during an exhibition game. Williams like many of the others on my walls came well before yours or my time, yet inspirational since right at the apogee of his career Williams left baseball to become a fighter pilot during WWII. In the air he blinded fellow pilots with his hand-eye coordination and by always taking the fight to the enemy. What might his career record have been had Williams not been interrupted by a war?
 
Also on my walls hang the signatures of Cleveland's Jim Brown playing at the Polo Grounds, Bobby Orr's famous "levitation shot" where upon scoring the winning goal for the '70' Stanley Cup, he's tripped by the goal tender and in perfect millisecond timing is photographed parallel to the ice, as if a master illusionist's trick suspended him there. Pictures of Steve Yzerman skating with the Stanley Cup high over his head, Ernie Bank's photo signed "To Heath with love" on the occasion of my son's 16th birthday, and an NFL football signed in silver flash reading simply, "Bret Favre."
 
But of them all, the most motivating memento from the lost time and vanished years of sports is a subtle black & white of my high school coaching staff, still regarded as arguably one of the best Michigan high school staffs ever assembled. Kneeling in front of venerable old Mt. Pleasant Memorial Stadium in the greatest home town anyone ever claimed, are the 9 men in 'M' jackets who taught me more about preparing for battle, fighting to win, and the rules of self conduct in any competition. I frequently glance at that picture, remembering how fortunate we all were to have guidance and motivation from great mentors. Here's to inspiration wherever it finds us.