The Hard Hat

Cover image: Inside Lacrosse

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright © 2015 by The Jon Gordon Companies. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Gordon, Jon, 1971-

The hard hat: 21 ways to be a great teammate / Jon Gordon.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-119-12011-7 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-119-12012-4 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-119-12013-1 (ebk)

1. Teams in the workplace. 2. Motivation (Psychology) I. Title.

HD66.G672 2015

650.1’3–dc23

2015008091

I remember hearing the news. The captain of Cornell's lacrosse team had died, on the field of play, after getting hit in the chest with a ball. How terrible, how cruel, how utterly tragic. What else could you think? As a Cornell graduate, with a connection to the lacrosse program, perhaps I felt all those things more acutely than most people who came across the news in their newspaper or on the Internet. In a way, the death was more real to me because I had grown up around Cornell lacrosse, I knew Cornell lacrosse players, and I understood how tight knit that community had always been.

Just two years earlier, in my role as a reporter at ESPN, I had written a tribute to the life of another Cornell lacrosse captain who had died too young, but not nearly as young as George Boiardi. Eamon McEneaney, one of the sport's great figures, had died on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center, where he worked in finance. When attending his funeral in New Canaan, Connecticut, I witnessed an outpouring of emotion that stays with me even now. Richie Moran, Cornell's longtime head coach, a man I had known all my life, eulogized McEneaney. Totally overcome, he barely made it through his tribute. I have never seen a grown man or woman so unhinged by grief. He was sobbing, and his pain was so pure that everyone in the church could feel it. It was beautiful and awful – an unforgettable coda to a week unlike any other in New York. It was also indicative of the way in which Cornell lacrosse is a family. The current team was there, McEneaney's old teammates were there, and the network of friends and acquaintances he had made through lacrosse were all there.

Then George died on St. Patrick's Day, 2004. That was cruel, too – not because George was of Irish extraction, but because Moran and McEneaney and so many others in the Cornell lacrosse community were. I had never met George. I don't think I had ever heard his name until the day he died, although I assumed we had been together at McEneaney's funeral. But over the next several years, I would come to know George – through his family and friends, at the events they held to honor his memory and to raise money to benefit causes that were meaningful to him.