QUOTE, UNQUOTE

ON TEACHING CLASSES

AT BELMONT ABBEY:

“It’s nothing. I stay six pages ahead of the class. When somebody asks me a question I can’t answer, I say, ‘It’ll take too much time to explain. See me after class.’ We have two doors in each classroom. When the period ends, I duck out whichever door the kid isn’t near.”

*

ON RUNNING UP SCORES:

“We don’t want to bury anyone. I don’t want to become an undertaker.”

sg,1.3

*

ON OVERCONFIDENCE:

“I hope our heads aren’t getting out of proportion. You gotta fight the heads sometimes. . . . I’d rather have it that way than the other, though. I keep telling the guys, ‘We don’t want to learn through losing. Let’s learn by winning.’ ”

*

ON NEARLY BLOWING A LEAD

AGAINST WISCONSIN:

“We started to be cozy too early. We played too much clock, tried to ice the game too early. But we won and I can’t complain, as close to chokeberry time as it was.” Then later on that same game: “I still count that game as a loss. We had them by 13 points and let them off the hook. And I coached it. It was my fault for not pulling up when we got that lead. A dead fish stinks from the head, so I take the blame for that one.”

*

ON PLAYING HARD:

“Basketball is a contact sport and we haven’t even had any injuries this year. What have we had--two sore throats and a hangnail. I’m disgusted.”

*

ON COACHING:

“If a boy leaves after four years without some of your blood in him, then I don’t think you’ve done too much. I’ve found that every boy has a problem that needs counseling, whip lashing or petting. But we have an understanding: I’m the boss and no doubt. I can help them but I can’t be a social worker or a man of the cloth. There’s got to be more sandpaper in me.”

*

ON PLAYER GRADUATION:

“I want my players to get their degrees, even if it takes more than four years. I think the NCAA should have a rule that any school playing a senior, and then not giving him his degree, should be put on probation.”

*

ON RACE RELATIONS:

“Sometimes we have white kids with guilt complexes and black kids with persecution problems. I try to tell them that what happened between blacks and whites in the past is past. It wasn’t this generation that’s responsible and there’s no point in trying to make repayment because the people who ought to be repaid are dead.”

*

ON PLAYING AT

MADISON SQUARE GARDEN:

“There’s something about the Garden that psychs out players. It doesn’t usually hit the Eastern teams too hard, but teams from the Midwest and South usually are affected. They call it Gardenitis.”

*

ON WINNING AND LOSING:

“There’s one thing worse than playing bad and winning. That’s playing good and losing.”

ON PLAYING ST. JOHN’S, HIS ALMA MATER, IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME OF THE NIT:

“I’m glad we’re playing them because I graduated from there. They took me from being a bartender to where I am.”

*

ON PREPARING FOR LIFE:

“You need to be a New York cab driver for six months and a bartender for six months. Then you should be ready.”

*

ON SOPHOMORE BASKETBALL PLAYERS:

“The best thing about sophomores is that they

become juniors.”