Don’t Drown Five Feet from the Beach

I interviewed Tommy Lasorda on the eve of Game Seven of the World Series.

The final game. One night to decide the champion. Everything that had happened before it—the long season, the travel, the injuries, the pressure, the games that had brought them there—was now standing in one place, waiting for the first pitch.

Lasorda, the legendary manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers was working as commentator and doing interviews to promote the game. I asked him for his best locker-room speech.

He didn’t hesitate. He immediately exploded into professional baseball manager mode. As he spoke, his whole body seemed to enter the clubhouse with him. The voice got bigger. The hands waved all around. The room became a field of men who had one last job to do.

He described a crew of sailors thrown from their boat in the middle of the ocean.

They had no easy way home. They had to survive the open water. They navigated on rafts, swam for months, endured the sun and thirst. Sharks moved beneath them. Every day was a fight to keep going, to find direction, to get closer to land.

At last, after all that time, they could see the beach.

They kept moving. They fought through the water. They got closer and closer until the shore was right there, close enough to reach.

Then, five feet from the beach, they drowned.

Lasorda let the picture sit there.

That was the speech.

You can do the hard part. You can survive the journey. You can outlast the pain, the fear, the long stretches when the destination is nowhere in sight. You can get all the way to the edge of what you set out to do.

And then you can lose it in the last five feet.

The story stayed with me because it named a particular kind of failure. Not the failure that comes from never trying, or from being unable to do the work. The failure that comes when you have already done almost everything required and still have to finish.

The closer you get, the easier it is to believe the work is over. The body is tired. The mind starts looking toward the celebration, the relief, the moment after the thing is done. You begin to live in the victory before you have earned it.

But the last five feet are a critical and precarious part of the journey.

That was the point of asking Lasorda for a speech on the eve of Game Seven. The teams had to play one more game. The whole history of how they got there mattered, but it could not take the field for them. The only thing that could decide the final victor was what they did next.

That lesson travels well beyond baseball. A business can build for years and stumble at the point where it has to deliver. A campaign can bring people to the edge of change and lose them in the final decisions. A person can spend a lifetime moving toward a promise and quit when the shore is finally visible.

Getting close is not the same as getting there.

When the finish comes into view, don’t start celebrating. Don’t let exhaustion make the decision for you. Don’t mistake the sight of the beach for solid ground.

Keep moving.

Five feet is still five feet. Don’t drown there.