Any Given Sunday was released in 1999, directed by Oliver Stone. Al Pacino's pre-game speech is considered one of the best sports speeches ever filmed. What most people miss is what the speech is actually about. D'Amato is not talking about winning the game. He is talking about his entire life: the marriages he destroyed, the opportunities he ignored, the inches he gave away to things that did not matter. He is an old man standing in a locker room confessing to the young men around him that he wasted his one shot. The speech is a lamentation, not a battle cry.

Philippians 4:6-7 was written by Paul from a Roman prison. He was under arrest, uncertain whether he would live or die. He had just told the Philippians to rejoice always. Then he writes do not be anxious about anything. The Greek word for anxious is merimnao, meaning to be divided, to have your mind pulled in two directions at once. The instruction is to present your requests to God. The word present is prosago, meaning to bring forward and place before. The result is the peace of God that guards your heart. The Greek word for guard is phroureo, a military term meaning to garrison, to station soldiers at a post.

D'Amato's speech is about wasted inches. Philippians 4 is about anxiety. The connection is that most anxiety is really about the inches: the things we are afraid of losing, the outcomes we are trying to control, the scenarios we keep running. Paul's instruction is not to have better mental hygiene. It is to transfer the burden. Bring it to God. Set it down. Leave it there. The man who actually does this discovers what Paul calls the peace that surpasses understanding. It does not make sense given his circumstances. It is the peace of a man who has decided that the God he believes in is actually larger than the thing he is afraid of. D'Amato spent his life trying to manage the inches himself. Paul spent years in prison in a peace that defied the conditions.