I always wanted the ball in my hands with a game on the line, as I think any real competitor does.
You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.
Anything can happen with hard work and dedication.
I don’t really want to go into my problems with the team at the time except to say that no one’s ever had to pay me to play basketball.
The marketing of players has created untold wealth for many sports stars. You can’t blame them or the company that covets the relationship with them, but that doesn’t mean the player is good.
Personalities seem in many cases to dominate the lucrative endorsement market. But that doesn’t upset me. What upsets me is when not enough attention is paid to the product-the game.
I would hope that racism is something that just does not work in this day and age, but I know otherwise.
If you can’t see someone’s got a game with great personality, you shouldn’t be out there looking.
I was not a great ballhandler. I just worked very hard at it, and I got to be a good ballhandler-a competent ballhandler-but never a great ballhandler.
As you get older, every chance to win a championship is more crucial, because you are going to have less and less of them.
Coaches who have been players in the league, they get so attuned to playing how they were successful, and who their coaches were.
I enjoy winning, but more importantly I enjoy the people I’m around.
I’m just ultracompetitive. I will be till they put me in the grave.
I’ve seen a lot in my life. I’ve seen a lot of winning. I’ve seen a lot of testing times. I think when you’re tested, you really find out what you’re made of.
The only thing I care about is winning. That’s all. If you don’t want to win, you don’t want to be around me.
As a player all you can do is play within yourself, even in the context of a team sport.
You can’t imagine how much good luck is involved in winning, but all of a sudden, you get in a situation where every break goes your way, every call goes your way, every ball that rolls around drops in instead of out. It feels magical.
The passion to win games, the incredible, focused energy and also the camaraderie of the team were all things that I really loved.
You can’t ever totally know what’s inside of someone else, or see the kind of will someone like Magic has. You have to rely on your instincts to find people who hate losing and know how to win.
To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It’s great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don’t believe that.
Basketball came to me and for some reason it gave me an opportunity to live a life that I didn’t dream possible. But it did let me live my dreams.