I’ve always coached youth baseball–except for one year when I coached Saturday morning basketball.  One of my baseball players, Bennie Crabtree, contacted me and asked if I’d coach his team.  So I said sure.  Lack of knowledge never kept me from doing something.  The team was composed of sixth graders.  One of my players was a skinny and kind of awkward kid named Atul Gawande.  He tried hard but basketball wasn’t really his sport.

Fast forward many years later.  Atul Gawande is now a well known physician and author.  It’s hard to describe all the things he has done.  Here’s his bio from his website:

Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is a surgeon, writer, and public health leader. He is CEO of the non-profit-seeking health care venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase to deliver better outcomes, satisfaction, and cost efficiency in care. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is the founding executive director and chairman of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally.

Atul has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998 and has written four New York Times bestsellers: Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, Academy Health’s Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.

I take great pride in killing his basketball career.  Because of me, he went on to accomplish all these other things.