“A coach is shaped by his experiences in the game and outside the game. When my team went out on the court for warm-ups, I would stay in the dressing room for several minutes, thinking of all the things that might go wrong. He must communicate in positives, never dwell on how the team might lose, and I never deviated from that approach. But when the team left the dressing room, all those suppressed negatives would emerge, and for several minutes I would be in a mental hell.”
“As the years went by, I would linger in the dressing room longer, and longer. By my last year (1960), I was barely making the starting tipoff. When the game started I was all right, in complete control. But I never lost that sense of loneliness. Maybe it was this fear of failure that made me a successful coach.”
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