Jason Terry has the Larry O’Brien trophy tattooed on his right biceps, which isn’t too surprising as on June 12, 2011, Jason Terry won the NBA Championship with the Dallas Mavericks. The strange and interesting part of the story is that he got the trophy tattooed on October 19, 2010, almost one year earlier.
On that day, Jason Terry’s Mavericks teammate DeShawn Stevenson, brought his personal tattoo artist along for the players to get a tattoo as a team-building exercise.
That’s when Jason Terry decided to get the Larry O’Brien tattoo as motivation to win the title. When Stevenson first saw what kind of tattoo Terry chose, he thought he lost his mind.
The night after the Mavericks won their Western Conference Finals series against the Oklahoma City Thunder, the tattoo story became public. The Mavericks made the NBA Finals and were only four wins away from acutally winning the trophy. Being the initiator, DeShawn Stevenson was asked about it and said:
“When he first got the tattoo, I said he was crazy. I didn’t say it to him. But I’ve never been to the [NBA Finals], and for him to have that now. Wow. And he got that tattoo in October, and it means a lot with what we’ve been through.”
Terry got the tattoo not only as a symbol of motivation, but also because he felt that the team was destined to win the Championship.
“Everybody laughed and they thought it was a joke at the time. When they actually see me get it, they were like, ‘This boy is serious.’ And our whole talk and conversation was about right now, about us getting to this point and winning it all.”
As you all know, Jason Terry’s feeling was right. The Dallas Mavericks went on to beat the hotly favored Miami Heat 4-2 in the NBA Finals. It was the best possible redemtion for Terry and Nowitzki, the only two remaining Mavericks players that lost to the Heat in the 2006 Finals in an unfortunate manner.
Getting the tattoo was a bold move, some may say it was stupid, but we all know that you have to be just as strong mentally as you are physically, and getting this tattoo as a reminder of what’s possible if you work hard was totally worth it.
