Wooden and Strasburg offer some perspective

In the last week, we’ve recalled the unparalleled career of John Wooden with all of his wisdom-drenched quotes, and then given tremendous hope for baseball in Washington D.C., which has starved for this kind of baseball success in the form of Stephen Strasburg for more than 30 years. It's been an end of an era, and the beginning of another, within days.

Wooden's graciousness was highlighted when he welcomed nearly every autograph seeker, and continued to write love letters to his wife decades after she passed away. While his 88-game winning streak and 10 National Championships are eye-popping, it’s his humble and soft-spoken personality that resonates today.

Perhaps because it’s so rare.

With 14 strikeouts in seven innings, Strasburg lived up to the impossible hype of today's social media and 24-hour news cycle culture where everything is magnified.

In a time where there is incredible divide and conflict in news and politics, it's refreshing, once again, to be reminded that sports is the place to go for hope, wisdom and perspective. It's lessons on how to handle yourself with all of life's adversity and ups and downs. Through it all, we are reminded that simplicity and focus are most important. If you listen to Wooden's wisdom, you make it routine to help someone every day, to make your small slice of the world a better place.

“You can’t live a perfect day,” Wooden once said, “without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

It’s important to note that in the age of multi-million dollar contracts for college and pro coaches and players, one of the top five coaches of all-time, in any sport, made less than $40,000 per year in the peak of his career.

If you observed Strasburg, who by the way signed for $15.1 million last summer, I hope you took away his sharp focus to simply do his job, while using a rare combination of God-given ability and work ethic. That in front of more than 40,000 fans in the stands, and millions more on TV and radio, he kept the blinders on.

It’s nearly impossible to live up to the pre-game hype, and only the 2006 Texas-USC National Championship, and the sustained careers of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady come close to doing so in recent memory. But Strasburg exceeded the hype in a revolutionary way.

Given the passing of one great contributor to sports and life lessons, and the hope and optimism of the dawning of a new superstar, stop and realize the era that we live in and how these types of things rarely come along in a week’s time.