"As I sat despondently in the locker room waiting for a trainer to cut the tape off my ankles, my only thoughts were on the proverbial 10,000 hours I had spent over the past decade—ending in such futility.  It was an unfathomable, humiliating and wholly unanticipated debacle.  At that moment, in the midst of my gloom, I could not have imagined that my basketball life essentially had just begun."