I wonder if we don’t spend so much time admiring Atticus that we forget about his failure. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus does not win the court case. Isn’t it curious that Atticus Finch, voted the greatest hero in 20th Century Film by the AFA, is a loser in court? If you get right down to it – Atticus, as far as we know, has NEVER won a criminal court case. Scout tells us at the beginning of the novel that her father’s last two criminal clients were also the last two hanged in Maycomb County – interesting that we admire someone who simply doesn’t win.

Basketball was kind of a second religion in my family, my dad had played in college and all of us kids played as well. He had been an educator and a coach and would often to say to me that he believed a player’s true character would become evident when they were losing. In my short time coaching junior varsity basketball my teams and I provided plenty of opportunities to test that theory – and itseemed true. People get real when you lose.

But losing might hold the greatest lesson that we can learn from Atticus Finch. We are living in a culture and an economy where there a lot of people losing – there is plenty of disappointment to go around. I think it might help to recall that the small town lawyer who took the Tom Robinson case had a pretty good idea it wasn’t going to go well for him, his client, even his own children – but he did it anyway. Discouragement is going to come and go — or as Atticus says “sometimes you win, but sometimes you don’t” — but we should always remember it is how we choose to handlediscouragement and failure thatis the truest measure of who we are…