Sports create a bond between comtemporaries that lasts a lifetime. It also gives your life structure, discipline and a genuine, sincere, pure fulfillment that few other areas of endeavor provide.
Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful at anything you put your mind to
The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.
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.
Do your best when no one is looking.
In whatever sport of field of endeavor you are interested, you should do whatever is necessary to compliment your God-given talent with proper mental preparation so as to do "the best you can." The criterion should be to fully exploit your potential rather than to win at any cost. What more could anyone ever ask of you than to be the best you possibly can?
But in fairness also to the idea of continuing success, you also have to exploit opportunities.
I dribbled by the hour with my left hand when I was young. I didn't have full control, but I got so I could move the ball back and forth from one hand to the other without breaking the cadence of my dribble. I wasn't dribbling behind my back or setting up any trick stuff, but I was laying the groundwork for it.
The NBA wasn't a big deal at that time, so it wasn't really in my career plans.
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.
I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.
We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.
But as a coach I wanted to keep things from being too complicated.
Bob Brannum was my body guard on the court. He was 6'-6 and built like a bulldog.
I once heard that Paul Seymour said as much as winning an NBA Championship, he'd like to see the Celtics lose a game after Auerbach brought out the cigar so he could go up to Arnold and stuff the cigar in his face.
My family was poor, my father drove a cab for a living, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat.
I grew up in the heart of the Depression.
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.
Indiana gets credit for having the most rabid basketball fans in the union, but Maine is a very, very active basketball state.
We had a strong relationship with Walter Brown, and felt that he was the best owner in the league.
We played every night. Sometimes we'd stay overnight after a game, but we'd usually drive on to our next destination.
There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.
People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.
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.
We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the things that other kids did.
