This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
Ryan Robertson played one game in the NBA for the 1999-2000 Sacramento Kings. He is now an executive with the financial firm Future Standard.
I’ll start with the down-the-middle story.
I was not expected to get drafted in 1999. On draft night, I sat there with my parents, my brother and my fiancé at the time (now my wife). I knew I wasn’t going in the first round. In the second round, I thought there were only one, maybe two teams that would draft me.
The draft broadcast went to commercial break around the 44th pick. When they came back, my picture was on the screen at No. 45. That’s how I found out I was going to the Sacramento Kings.
I was obviously very, very excited, but there was a level of anxiety right from the beginning. This is now real. I’m going to an NBA roster and I’m going to have to perform. I had all these thoughts. Am I going to be good enough? Am I going to be able to perform?
At the time, teams could only dress 12 players, but they could have 15 guys on the team. Sacramento opted to only have 14 that year, so Bill Wennington and I were the 13th and 14th players on the roster. And it seemed like we went that entire season without a major injury, so I never played.
I had the best seat for 81 games. I sat on the bench and watched, front row to it all. Hard practices. Road trips. Private flights. Nice hotels. Fights. It was all basketball for somebody who just loved basketball.
In the final game of the season, we were playing in Utah. Rick Adelman, our coach, came up to me and said, “We’re activating you tonight. You’re going to play.”
That entire season I had tried to be a professional, tried to be ready, so that if I ever got a chance, I wouldn’t embarrass myself. More than anything, when Adelman told me that and I went back to my hotel room, I was relieved. All the work and preparation and hoping — I was actually going to see if that preparation paid off.
It was an experience I’ll never forget. I guarded Hall of Famer John Stockton. I was on the court with Hall of Famer Karl Malone. I made a jumper in the second half and then took it to the basket, got fouled and made an and-one.
On paper, it went fine: 25 minutes, 6 shots, 5 points.
But I took that opportunity and just tried not to make a mistake. I played safe and conservative. My mindset was: Don’t lose. I wasn’t thinking about trying to go out there and win, and that’s probably the reason I’m in financial services today and not retired with a bunch of money from the NBA.
Now that I’m 49 and looking back, I wish I had used that opportunity to try to go for 50. In the NBA, sometimes you only get one opportunity. One chance. If I could do it over again, I would let it fly and say to myself: Every single time you touch the ball, you should try to score.
The upside would have been unbelievably high, and the downside would have been what happened to me. I went back to Sacramento the second year, got cut in training camp and went to Europe.
When I finished playing in Europe and moved into the financial world, I actually had a completely different mindset than I did with basketball.
My whole life until that point was about basketball. From the time I was 6 years old, I was always one of the better players. I was a McDonald’s All-American. I was a top recruit as a point guard and went to Kansas. I had a lot of expectations.
In the financial world, I had no expectations. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was capable of. I had to figure out a way to be successful in this new world so I could put food on the table for me, my wife, and my young kids. I was super aggressive and would do anything it took to be successful.
I’m a big believer in the saying “Sometimes your biggest strengths are your biggest weaknesses, and your biggest weaknesses are your biggest strengths.”
One of my weaknesses is that I do care a lot about what other people think. That then drives me to be as good as I can. But in the NBA, it also drove me to want to play relatively safely because I didn’t want to disappoint people. I didn’t want people to go: Oh, man, he failed. He did a poor job. At the same time, that pressure is what has driven me to succeed outside of basketball.
My mindset in the NBA: Am I going to fail?
My mindset in the financial world: Am I going to succeed?
In the NBA, I felt like I was running uphill. And in the business world, I felt like I was running downhill.
I’m really proud of the way both worlds worked out. I tried to make the NBA work. I became a better player in Europe than I was in the NBA. And since transitioning to this world, I’ve gone from a small-firm sales guy to Goldman Sachs to now Future Standard, where I’m running distribution in a global sense.
I’m proud of all of that. I gave it my shot in the NBA, but knowing what I know now, I wish I had tried to go for 50 in that one game. I wish I had been super aggressive.
Sometimes you only get one chance.
— As told to Jayson Jenks