Jim Valvano's ESPY Speech

Jim Valvano was dying. He knew it. The audience knew it. He had been diagnosed with metastatic adenocarcinoma, and he had weeks to live. He could barely stand. He needed help walking to the podium. And then, for eleven minutes, he delivered the funniest, most life-affirming, most heartbreaking speech in the history of sports — a speech that launched the V Foundation for Cancer Research and has raised over $350 million since his death.

Valvano's thesis was simple: every day, you should laugh, you should think, and you should have your emotions moved to tears. 'If you do that, you've had a full day.' He demonstrated all three in real time — making the audience roar with laughter about his coaching career, making them think about the meaning of time and mortality, and reducing them to tears with his closing plea: 'Don't give up. Don't ever give up.'

The speech is almost impossible to watch without crying. Not because it is sad — although it is devastatingly sad — but because Valvano's spirit is so undiminished by his circumstances that it redefines what courage looks like. He was a college basketball coach who won an NCAA championship with NC State in 1983. But his real championship was this speech: eleven minutes of grace under the most extreme pressure a human being can face. He died eight weeks later.