Jerryd Bayless living life abundantly

This has started out as a great season for Jerryd Bayless — great from the perspective that he is finally becoming part of Nate McMillan’s rotation on a regular basis and great because, well, just because life is great.

Many NBA fans had a view of Bayless that was a bit askew when he came into the league as a rookie. He gives off an outward appearance of intense seriousness; a seriousness that is sometimes misconstrued as arrogance. What is increasingly apparent is that this misconception is one that needs redressing.

The best thing that could have happened for fans of the young power-packet guard was his decision a couple of weeks ago to start a blog. This blog has confirmed a few thoughts I had on JBay:

1. He’s not arrogant, just quietly self-confident in his abilities, as he should be. More than this, the word to describe him, I believe, is “focussed.” His mind is on the job at hand at all times — no matter whether that is playing basketball, being a good family member or in his studies when he was younger.
2. He’s intelligent. Just read the way he writes and take a look at his family and you get the idea. In his first blog post he wrote, “It’s kind of funny to me that I ended up being a professional basketball player, considering the way my family is structured. My Mother is a counselor/teacher at a community college in Phoenix. My Dad is a forensic Psychologist and has owned his own clinic in Phoenix for over 30 years. My brother recently quit Wall-street to be the CFO of my Father’s company. Besides my Mom, who takes early morning runs, and my brother, who played sports but never really took it serious enough to go past high school, there was never a large emphasis on athletics in my family when I was growing up. The thing with my parents was all school. Now, I know you hear a lot of athletes say that their parents wouldn’t let them play or hang out after school until they got their homework done. My parents would take it to the next level — not letting me earn more than one B on my report card without being grounded. They gradually changed when I got to high school because of all the traveling that I had to do, but I knew not to play when it came to academics.”
3. He sees the bigger picture. His latest blog post is a great read. Jerryd talks about how his motto is to “live life abundantly” and he reminds us to do the same. It’s a mantra that is so true, but so often forgotten by most of us in our day-to-day struggles to do the things that supposedly matter. Sometimes it’s important to step back and remember what truly matters.
4. He’s a genuine person. Sure, his entry about living life to the fullest says a lot about his character, but there is one other thing which stands out for me. In this era where youngsters and in particular young, rich professional sports people are criticised for falling over themselves in the bling culture, Jerryd is rocking a blogspot blog that is plain as they come. Many other players throughout the league start up blogs to “brand” themselves and promote their personae with flashy interfaces and all manner of bells and whistles — those same players then fail to actually put a whole lot of themselves into those sites, or when they do blog, they leave fans with bland entries with little insight into their true selves. Bayless is here talking about what appear to be his genuine, inner feelings and as he said in his first post, “I can assure you basketball might be one of the last things on the list. I’ve always considered myself much more than a basketball player and feel like this blog is a perfect way to show that.” Refreshing. This is what really “giving back to the fans” is all about.