I think what has happened to our basketball team, we’ve been badly distracted. They’re not reading too many positive things in the paper.
BILL RUSSELLThe most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.
More Bill Russell Quotes
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Friendship is a full-time job.
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On females officiating in the NBA -Incompetence should not be confined to one sex.
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Heart in champions has to do with the depth of our motivation and how well your mind and body react to pressure – that is, being able to do what you do best under maximum pain and stress.
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The last five or six days, I’ve been running. The last two days, I’ve been running pretty hard. Everybody’s got to be someplace.
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We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us-anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.
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I think that David Stern is probably the greatest commissioner that any sport has ever had in the history of this country.
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Success is a result of consistent practice of winning skills and actions. There is nothing miraculous about the process. There is no luck involved.
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My father once told me that anyone who worked for three dollars an hour owed it to himself to put in four dollars’ worth of work.
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The morale and the camaraderie that we had for one another earlier in the year is starting to come under duress because of all the losses. Some of the guys are feeling the pressure now from the last year when they were not successful.
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We overreached our decision power. Sometimes our decisions have to fit the reality of the outside world.
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If a guy pays you five dollars, you give him seven dollars worth of work.
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People say it was the greatest individual rivalry they’ve ever seen. I agree with that. Let me assure you that if either Wilt’s or Russ’ coach had ever told one of them he couldn’t guard the other guy, he would have lost that player forever.
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Create unselfishness as the most important team attribute.
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What’s more important than who’s going to be the first black manager is who’s going to be the first black sports editor of the New York Times.
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You can do anything you want to do if you want it bad enough.
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To me, the most important part of winning is joy. You can win without joy, but winning that’s joyless is like eating in a four-star restaurant when you’re not hungry. Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight, that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.
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Most people have a harder time letting themselves love than finding someone to love them.
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You got to have the killer instinct. If you do not have it, forget about basketball and go into social psychology or something. If you sometimes wonder if you’ve got it, you ain’t got it. No pussycats, please.
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If you really have integrity, there are very few people who can insult you, or honor you.
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The most important thing to me is the friends that I’ve made.
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To love someone is nothing, to be loved by someone is something, to love someone who loves you is everything.
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The only important statistic is the final score.
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What distinguishes a great player is his presence. When he goes on to the court, his presence dominates the atmosphere.
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If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it’s not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.
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If you can take something to levels that very few other people can reach, then what you’re doing becomes art.
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The idea is not to block every shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.
BILL RUSSELL