Bob Cousy Quotes

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.

My family was poor, my father drove a cab for a living, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat.

We ran an up-tempo, transition-style of game at Boston College - very similar to what we ran when I played for Arnold.

You have to remember that coaching wasn't sophisticated back then - you didn't have the camps, clinics and all the technical advances that are available today - so from that standpoint, playing with a cast on my arm was a fortunate event in my life.

Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful in anything that you put your mind to.

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.

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?

My biggest win was getting the meal money bumped from $5 to $7.

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.

Do your best when no one is looking.

But in fairness also to the idea of continuing success, you also have to exploit opportunities.

Bob Brannum was my body guard on the court. He was 6'-6 and built like a bulldog.

I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.

It also didn't take me long to decide that Tri-Cities wasn't for me, and that I wasn't going to go there to play basketball.

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.

We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the things that other kids did.

We played every night. Sometimes we'd stay overnight after a game, but we'd usually drive on to our next destination.

Russell joined the team in December, 1956, following the Olympics.

We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan. It's further east than Hell's Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches and cockroaches were big enough to carry away small children.

We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.