You can’t imagine the number of people in professional sports who have come up to me and said, “God, you treat those assholes like I’d like to treat them.” And my question is, “Then why don’t you?”.
We don’t want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What’s going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?
I’ve always had an a$$-to-the-brain theory. When a player’s a$$ gets put on the bench, a message goes straight to the brain saying, Get me off of here.
All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average.
There are times when my passion for basketball led me into confrontations that I could have handled a lot better. I’ve always been too confrontational, especially when I know I’m right.
As I’ve said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators – not recently – fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.
