LARRY BIRD

The best players will play. That's the way it will always be.

When it gets down to it, basketball is basketball.

I get homesick.

Leadership is getting players to believe in you. If you tell a teammate you're ready to play as tough as you're able to, you'd better go out there and do it. Players will see right through a phony. And they can tell when you're not giving it all you've got.

Once you are labeled 'the best' you want to stay up there, and you can't do it by loafing around.

While day by day the overzealous student stores up facts for future use, he who has learned to trust nature finds need for ever fewer external directions. He will discard formula after formula, until he reaches the conclusion: Let nature take its course.

Push yourself again and again. Don't give an inch until the final buzzer sounds.

Leadership is diving for a loose ball, getting the crowd involved, getting other players involved. It's being able to take it as well as dish it out. That's the only way you're going to get respect from the players.

But it is a black man's game, and it will be forever.

What's better? Dogs or broomsticks? I mean will the world really ever know?

I've got a theory that if you give 100% all of the time, somehow things will work out in the end.

I don't know if I practiced more than anybody, but I sure practiced enough. I still wonder if somebody - somewhere - was practicing more than me.

I wasn't real quick, and I wasn't real strong. Some guys will just take off and it's like, whoa. So I beat them with my mind and my fundamentals.

I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.

When I was a kid, like 14 or 15, I played with the waiters from the hotel, 'cause that was the best game. And these guys, they'd let me play. And they were black guys.

The best player I ever played with was Dennis Johnson.

I really don't like talking about money. All I can say is that the Good Lord must have wanted me to have it.

I used to love the feeling of running, of running too far. It made my skin tingle.

As far as playing, I didn't care who guarded me - red, yellow, black. I just didn't want a white guy guarding me, because it's disrespect to my game.

A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals.

I like being by myself.

If there was a payment to the bank due, and we needed shoes, she'd get the shoes, and then deal with them guys at the bank. I don't mean she wouldn't pay the bank, but the children always came first.

The one thing that always bothered me when I played in the NBA was I really got irritated when they put a white guy on me.

It's been a journey, the NBA. It's taken me a lot farther than I ever expected.

I've been around a while. I kinda know these things.