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The One and The Only Jimmy Valvano Essay

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The One and The Only Jimmy Valvano
“Never give up! Failure and rejection are only the first step to succeeding”. These were the words that the late Jimmy Valvano gave to his audience at the ESPY Awards on March 3rd 1993. The ESPY Awards are sponsored by ESPN each year for those recognized for their achievement in sports. Almost 21 years ago, “Jimmy V” as he was known gave his speech because he was not told to; rather, he gave his speech because he was qualified to influence a revolution. Jimmy Valvano was a prestigious collegiate basketball coach at North Carolina State University. It was at North Carolina State, where he led his Cinderella team to a national championship in 1983. Just nine years later in 1992 he was diagnosed with a rare …show more content…

James wanted to accomplish all of his dreams with blood, sweat, and tears of hard work, and loyalty to the game he loved. Those blood, sweat and tears began to develop before the speech even started, and transpired till the very end, setting up how Valvano would approach what he would actually say. The first clip of the speech would be Jimmy V walking up the stage weary about the possibility of falling in front of the soon to be audience. For anybody who knows somebody who has, or who had cancer, walking up those few steps to get onto the stage were basically equivalent to climbing Mount Everest. Vigilant of potentially falling and showing how weak he actually was only developed Valvano’s emotional tone of the speech that never gave way. Since Jimmy V did not have a preplanned speech he spoke from his heart analyzing how close one can come from failure, to how much more you need to achieve for success. As words started sputtering out, Valvano used his emotional tone to organize what he actually wanted to inspire throughout the rest of the speech. Valvano had planned to be emotional, humorous, sympathetic, and straight forward throughout the whole speech to build up to this moment where he expects everyone watching to be more aware of cancer research because it is just as important as AIDS research. From this point on all eyes were on Jimmy V, the audience was calm, cool, and collective, and on

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