Bob Cousy Basketball Quotations

I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.

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.

The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.

But as a coach I wanted to keep things from being too complicated.

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

I grew up in the heart of the Depression.

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.

I won the city scoring championship as a senior.

Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.

The NBA wasn't a big deal at that time, so it wasn't really in my career plans.

There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.

We had a strong relationship with Walter Brown, and felt that he was the best owner in the league.

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

That seemed to be the case with most of the teams based in the smaller towns - the fans were more rabid, and they wanted to literally kill the opposition.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Cooper was my road roommate, and also happened to be the first African American player drafted by a National Basketball Association team.

Back then every small town had a gym, and if itseated more than 2,000 then we'd be interested in playing in it.

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

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.

Indiana gets credit for having the most rabid basketball fans in the union, but Maine is a very, very active basketball state.

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.

I had endured six years of frustration so I think winning it all meant more to me than most of the others on the team.

French was my first language.

Al has done a great job. Basketball has never been too high on the totem pole in Chestnut Hill, but he has really brought it out there to the spotlight.