I had endured six years of frustration so I think winning it all meant more to me than most of the others on the team.
BOB COUSYCooper was my road roommate, and also happened to be the first African American player drafted by a National Basketball Association team.
More Bob Cousy Quotes
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The NBA wasn’t a big deal at that time, so it wasn’t really in my career plans.
BOB COUSY -
Race wasn’t an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.
BOB COUSY -
I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.
BOB COUSY -
Do your best when no one is looking.
BOB COUSY -
That seemed to be the case with most of the teams based in the smaller towns – the fans were more rabid, and they wanted to literally kill the opposition.
BOB COUSY -
We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.
BOB COUSY -
We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan. It’s further east than Hell’s Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches and cockroaches were big enough to carry away small children.
BOB COUSY -
I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.
BOB COUSY -
Kerner decided to trade my rights to the Chicago Stags, which sounded better to me than Tri-Cities, but the Stags folded up almost immediately.
BOB COUSY -
Indiana gets credit for having the most rabid basketball fans in the union, but Maine is a very, very active basketball state.
BOB COUSY -
These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren’t any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.
BOB COUSY -
There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.
BOB COUSY -
It also didn’t take me long to decide that Tri-Cities wasn’t for me, and that I wasn’t going to go there to play basketball.
BOB COUSY -
Every jock gets up and tells the world how lucky he is. But I feel that I may be the luckiest one of all in terms of timing and being at the right place at the right moment-even though, for the last 30 years, I was told I was born 20 years too soon, for obvious reasons.
BOB COUSY -
Back then every small town had a gym, and if itseated more than 2,000 then we’d be interested in playing in it.
BOB COUSY