Basketball Quotes - Page 79

I am very proud to be featured, especially when you consider the outstanding champions who have had this honor. It is great company to be in.

In a lot of areas of my life, particularly in my teenage years, I began to think about the world, and to think about the universe as being a part of my conscious everyday life.

If you get depressed about being the second-best team in the world, then you've got a problem.

I played softball and basketball growing up. I really wanted to play football but both parents said no. I was mad for a second, then got over it. Now, just because I'm tall doesn't mean I can play basketball. I was waaaaay better at swinging a bat.

I think I've gotten more attention after the Olympics than any other U.S. athlete, and it's really great that people are recognizing who I am and what I do. You look at Shaq and you see a basketball player. You look at Tiger Woods and you see a golfer. But people are responding to who I am.

Conditioning is essential to success in basketball.

I found the bench to be the greatest ally when I had to make individuals comply with what was best for the team

We may not be the best conditioned team in the country, but our players think they are.

It isn't about what you do, but how you do it

It is most difficult, in my mind, to separate any success, whether it be in your profession, your family, or as in my case, in basketball, from religion.

A Coach must never forget that he is a leader and not merely a person with authority.

I do not judge success based on championships; rather, I judge it on how close we came to realizing our potential

We can have no progress without change, whether it be basketball or anything else.

Good players can take coaching; great players can take coaching and learn.

Although I wanted my players to work to win, I tried to convince them they had always won when they had done their best.

When people ask me now if I miss coaching UCLA basketball games, the national championships, the attention, the trophies, and everything that goes with them, I tell them this: I miss the practices.

The true athlete should have character, not be a character

I believe it’s impossible to claim you have taught, when there are students who have not learned. With that commitment, from my first year as an English teacher until my last as UCLA basketball teacher/coach, I was determined to make the effort to become the best teacher I could possibly be, not for my sake, but for all those who were placed under my supervision.

I would spend almost as much time planning a practice as conducting it. Everything was planned out each day

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

That's a dream of mine, to be able to coach at the NBA level.

Confidence imparts a wonderful inspiration to the possessor.

All at once, I couldn’t figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

If a person doesn't govern his temper, his temper will govern him.