Why Cayden Boozer is my new favorite athlete

You don’t have to be a fan of college basketball to know that “March Madness” is a thing in America. In fact, I recently heard a sports commentator call the NCAA basketball playoffs the “greatest spectacle in sports.” I was a bit dubious: I’m counting the days until the Masters begins and am excited about the Texas Rangers’ start to the season.

But the last five seconds in a game Sunday proved him right and introduced me to my new favorite athlete—not for what he did but for what he did not do and what he then did about it.

Duke held a two-point lead over Connecticut, with a trip to the Final Four seeming wrapped up. All they had to do was inbound the pass and not turn it over. The ball found its way to Cayden Boozer, which Duke fans would think was a very good thing. Boozer, the twin brother of Cameron, had put up fifteen points with six assists and five rebounds in the game. While a freshman, he is one of the best players on one of the best teams in the country.

All he had to do was hold onto the ball, take the foul, and the game would likely be over. But he tried to pass it up the court instead. A UConn defender deflected it. With time running out, it came to Braylon Mullins, who hit a thirty-five-foot shot that gave the Huskies a 73-72 victory and ended the season for the top overall seed in the tournament.

There were many reasons Duke lost. They had a nineteen-point lead that they frittered away. They missed free throws that would have sealed the game. But Cayden nonetheless said afterward, “I ruined our team’s season. That’s the best I can put it.”

“If there are rats in a cellar”

In any sport, failure is as inevitable as success. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a golfer play a tournament without a bogey. If you’re a hitter in baseball and you make an out only two-thirds of the time, you have a chance at the Hall of Fame. Even the best kickers in football and goalies in hockey fail on occasion.

In athletics, as in life, it’s not if we fail but when we fail that demonstrates our character and determines our ultimate success. Earthquakes don’t create fault lines—they reveal them.

When we succeed in ways our secularized culture celebrates, people don’t see what lies beneath the surface of our best selves. But when we fail, people see who we are, not just what we do. The way we react or respond shows them—and us—our private and therefore most authentic selves.

CS Lewis observed:

Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way, the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.

“Of which the reason is but a part”

This is one reason I appreciate the British political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–97). In a day when Enlightenment rationalism insisted that unaided human reason could create the most utopian society, he understood that human nature, as revealed through human emotion, is the foundational fact of collective experience.

He therefore insisted that “politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greater part.”

The fact of our fallenness also explains the urgency of checks and balances in governance so as to prevent the unaccountable power of any individual or group. Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine at the insistence of Vladimir Putin, the crumbling and chaotic failed state of Cuba under its small cabal of Communist dictators, and the widening threat to personal and religious liberty in Xi Jinping’s China all illustrate this reality.

Conversely, the fact of human fallenness points the way to the antidote to our moral disease. As George Washington famously observed, “religion and morality are indispensable supports” to our collective prosperity. He also warned,

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

“When I am weak, then I am strong”

Jesus—and only Jesus—can change the human heart. Only he can forgive our sin, save our souls, and transfuse our character by his Spirit as we become like our Lord (Galatians 5:22; Romans 8:29). This means that preaching the gospel and sharing God’s love in ours is not an imposition of our values on others but the giving of the most indispensable gift they can receive.

And it means that we should be as transparent about our failings as Cayden Boozer, so we can point to the Savior who alone gives us meaning and joy. He said of his turnover, “I’m going to replay that for the rest of my life.” But when we experience the transforming love of Jesus, we can find grace that transcends guilt and purpose in our pain.

And we can say with Paul, “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

Where are you “weak” today?