In 1993, college basketball coach Jim Valvano, who had led North Carolina State to the 1983 national championship, was dying of cancer. At the first ESPYS awards, he received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. He’d been sick with a fever that day and had to be helped onto the stage, but then he gave the speech of a lifetime. He told everybody to do three things every day: laugh, think, and have your emotions moved to tears. “If you laugh, you think and you cry, that’s a full day.” He announced a cancer research foundation with the motto, “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.” He ended, “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul.”
