Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful at anything you put your mind to
The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.
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.
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.
The NBA wasn't a big deal at that time, so it wasn't really in my career plans.
I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.
We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.
But as a coach I wanted to keep things from being too complicated.
Bob Brannum was my body guard on the court. He was 6'-6 and built like a bulldog.
My family was poor, my father drove a cab for a living, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat.
I grew up in the heart of the Depression.
Indiana gets credit for having the most rabid basketball fans in the union, but Maine is a very, very active basketball state.
We had a strong relationship with Walter Brown, and felt that he was the best owner in the league.
We played every night. Sometimes we'd stay overnight after a game, but we'd usually drive on to our next destination.
There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.
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.
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.
We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the things that other kids did.
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.
Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.
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.
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.
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.
I won the city scoring championship as a senior.
