You can't think about basketball or you ruin your game. It is an instinctive game.
I always stayed on before and after practice. I just think that if you want to excel at anything, be it basketball, dance or the piano, you need to practice a lot.
I've heard the joke a million times that "Jews in Sports" must be the thinnest book in the world. Actually, I've seen a lot of great players working at the Maccabi Games.
The great thing about basketball is it's a live ball. If someone's in your way, push them out of the way, go around them or over them, whatever it takes.
To get paid to play a game I love was enough for me, no matter what the rules were.
Most people forget that Danny Biasone was the Wilbur Wright of basketball. Because he invented the 24-second clock, the game took off. Yet he was a man who never played the game.
It's fair to say that Jews dominated basketball and that started in the 30s in all the big cities. I think it was simply because Jews lived in ghettoes and basketball is a great schoolyard game. You don't need a lot of space or equipment and you can adapt it to how many players you have.
As for the work ethic, I'm just the kind of guy who takes what he does seriously. I never missed a day of school, I've rarely missed work and I played all those straight games; my streak only ended when I broke my cheekbone.
Guys hated to play against me because my stock in trade was constant movement. I was quick but not fast so I would move my defender into picks, from one end of the court to another and wear him out until I had him tired and off-guard.
The real secret to my success was I could shoot with either hand. Ironically, I became ambidextrous as a direct result of breaking my right hand.
I was a center in college but I was a high post guy, feeding cutters and rebounding. Going to pro ball, I clearly wasn't big and strong enough to play center against giants like Mikan so I kept evolving.
Once people couldn't trust the college game, some checked out the pro game, but that was in big trouble, too. We had no clock and a lot of faults. People looked at the slow pace and at big guys like George Mikan and said pro basketball was just for overgrown pituitary cases. Baseball and football were numbers one and two and pro basketball wasn't even in the same universe.
A basketball diameter is 10 inches and a rim is 18 inches so I made a 14-inch rim I put in to practice on. Few people could do that because it was so frustrating that it drove everyone but me nuts. That led to me shooting very high, which basic physics tells you is the best angle - the hole is bigger from above than from the side.
I never had a postup game, which really hurt me eventually. Later in my career, teams would put smaller guys on me to stop my shooting and driving and I wasn't able to exploit my height advantage. I would just take bigger guys outside and drive or shoot my setshot.
I disobeyed a basic basketball rule and never boxed out. I figured that if I had the inside position I had enough of an advantage to just go get the ball. And coaches left me alone because I got it.
