Vern had some something special

“Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.”—Jim Valvano, former head coach, North Carolina State Men’s Basketball (1983 NCAA Champions)

They say you learn something new every day. I have never found that to be true in itself. You have to work at it, or at least be open to the learning; you have to be the kind of person who is content in the journey of discovery. If you are, not only will you learn a lot in your lifetime, but man, will you have fun doing it.

I am not going to pretend that I knew Vern Brunner very well. But I can tell you that Vern was the kind of guy who was content to be on that constant journey of discovery. That comes through loud and clear in the comments we received from our readers in the days that followed Vern’s passing—friends, colleagues, business partners and competitors alike. With Vern, it was a coin-flip as to which was bigger, his heart or his mind. You didn’t have to know Vern that well to know that both were huge.

I chose the quote from Jim Valvano for a couple of reasons. First, when Vern took the stage at last year’s NACDS Annual Meeting and accepted the Begley Award, I was instantly reminded of Valvano’s speech at the very first ESPY Awards in 1993. (For those unfamiliar with the ESPYs, it is the Oscars of the sporting world.) Not because of anything that Vern said, rather, it was the courage of the man in the moment, and the fact that in many ways, Vern seemed to me the physical embodiment of many of the things Jim Valvano said nearly 15 years before.

Basically, Jimmy V. left the audience that night with his philosophy of what constitutes a full life. Every day you should do three things: you should laugh, you should spend some time in deep thought and you should have your emotions moved to tears, whether out of happiness or joy. “That’s a full day,” Valvano said. “You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

There is no doubt that Vern had something special. And anyone who knew him had something special, too—they had Vern.

I won’t pretend that I knew Vern Brunner very well. But I wish that I had.