Almost had it

Lady Luck may be a cruel mistress, but you must take advantage of the opportunities whenever she looks favorably upon you.

I feel bad for the city of Toronto, and the country of Canada. Canadian sports are still paying penance for the Toronto Raptor’s 2019 NBA championship. How fortunate was it that Kevin Durant’s achilles tendon gave out during the NBA Finals? No hate, though. The Raptors took advantage when Lady Luck intervened on their behalf.

Sadly the Toronto Blue Jays did not do so during last evening’s World Series Game 7. How can your closer serve up an absolute meatball with two outs remaining, leading to a home-run to tie the game? The Blue Jays then had a chance to win it all at the bottom of the inning, but the lead runner on third base did the worst base running in the history of the game! Why on earth would you slide - slowing you down - when it’s a force out? Had the runner ran straight through, the Blue Jays would be World Champions today.

Soon as I saw the blunders in real time, I knew the Los Angeles Dodgers will end up winning the game. Lady Luck doesn’t stick around after you forsake her entreaties. I was, of course, correct.

Congratulations to the Dodgers on consecutive championships, a rare sight in baseball on this side of the millennium. The marquee team from LA is proof positive that you absolutely can win (multiple) gold by simply outspending everybody else on talent. Fans of other teams should look themselves in the mirror and ask why your own team isn’t competitively spending to the same level. Don’t hate the player, hate yourself.

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We go up.

It's all about luck

If there is a god, he must have a wicked sense of humor. The Dallas Mavericks have won, against highly unfavorable odds, the NBA draft lottery for the number one overall pick in the upcoming draft. This, only a short month and a half after the same team traded away their top five franchise star (Luca Doncic) for essentially peanuts. The dissatisfaction from Dallas fans then was bilabial. I guess karma really doesn’t exist!

The tar-and-feathering of Nico Harrison - GM of the Mavericks - ends immediately, right? Vindication for trading away a generational scoring talent in Doncic, but who can’t get in shape, and who can’t play defense? I’m not sure you can use that word when the reward is down to pure luck. Nevertheless, the Dallas franchise now gets to pick another, much younger, generational talent to replace Luca (Cooper Flagg). Are we sure this isn’t the Matthew principle at work?

This goes to show much much luck is involve in our successes and failures. I mean, isn’t the fact that we even exist at all is down to some goldilocks equation involving the position of the earth vis a vis the sun and the moon? Should the earth’s axis tilted slightly differently, then all of this would be nothing but less than a dream.

Look at the Golden State Warriors, currently deep into the NBA playoffs. The team is likely to lose the series to the Minnesota Timberwolves because transcendent star player Steph Curry suffered a freak non-contact injury in game one (of seven). Two Super Bowls ago, the 49ers defense was never the same after linebacker Dre Greenlaw suffered a torn achilles while getting on the field. Bad luck can absolutely ruin your day, no matter how good you actually are.

On the flip side, you can be less envious of successful people because there was likely a ton of good luck involved. This isn’t negating their hard work: you still have to put yourself in positions to leverage fortune positively. Even the couch potato needs to get off his ass to buy a lottery ticket at the gas station.

Dallas Mavericks fans must be feeling all sorts of mixed up right now.

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Drip.

The Healy travel luck

I have what my friends jokingly refers to as the “Healy travel luck.” It seems that when I go on vacation, things go very smoothly for me. And I’m not the type to obsessively plan things out into a rigid schedule. Serendipity has been kind to me, it must be said. Weather seems to cooperate where ever I go. The restaurants I encounter are all fine and delicious. A local immediately appears whenever I get stuck in a quandary when I’m in foreign countries.

In 2025 I wanted to make the annual trip home to Guangzhou, China during the QingMing Festival. It’s a yearly event where Chinese people visit their family burial sites to pay respects. I’ve never done it for the family on my father’s side (all residing in China), so the excitement was considerable.

But there’s only one problem: early April in Guangzhou can be rainy. And it’s the sort of tropical rain that you’re hopeless to defend with an umbrella. Never mind performing the rites: the rain is so heavy that you’d never get out of the car. My attention was glued to the weather forecast in the weeks leading up to the trip, with the unfortunate prediction that it was going to rain on the day of the visit to the graves.

Enter the Healy travel luck. It did rain that day, but it started in the afternoon. By that time, we were completely finished with the ceremonies in the morning. Funny enough, the sky opened up like crazy soon as we got back into our vehicles for the trip back to the hotel. It cannot get any more fortuitous than that.

Of course, I’ve completely jinxed myself just by typing out the previous paragraphs. Farewell, good fortune!

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For the grandparents.