Superiority and success doesn’t favor good effort or self-esteem… The mentally precise and physically fit win, while the mediocre and obtuse take solace in hopeful cliches.
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.
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.
And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit.
I’d probably be better off without trying to satisfy me, with my sense of humor. There are things that I have said that are funny to me, but they weren’t to somebody in the press. So that hasn’t worked to my benefit.
There are as many guys in coaching who do a lousy job as there are in the media. Those are two professions that are a lot alike. There aren’t a hell of a lot of really good coaches or writers.
When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was ‘It will be O.K.’ I would wonder, ‘How the hell is it going to be O.K.?’ The worst word in the English language is ‘hope.’
I also believe that when something negative comes out about you in the media, that’s only one person’s opinion. These guys sometimes believe they’ve been ordained from on high to give the general opinion of the populace, and that just isn’t the case.
Well, why will it be a better day? And I think the more that we believe in doing things better, doing the right thing rather than hoping that that’s going to happen, let’s make it happen.
