Quotes from around the sports world

Bill Belichick – NFL Coach
We don’t have backups and starters, we just have a team. Everybody is out there competing. It’s just a team, that’s all. All the players will earn their playing time. Whatever they get, they’ll earn it.

Bill Bradley – Princeton Basketball/Senator
Championship teams share a moment few others know. The overwhelming emotion derives from more than pride. Your devotion to your teammates, the depth of your sense of belonging, is like blood kinship but without the complications. In the nonverbal world of sports, it’s like grace and beauty and ease, and it spills into all areas of your life.

Tom Brady – New England Patriots
When you play this game for a while and reflect on all the great teams you’ve had, it comes down to a lot of guys that are willing to pay the price for each other. I think that’s really what you’re really trying to establish at this time of year.
What type of team you’re going to be? Who is willing to put it all on the line when, really there is no glory in this, an OTA practice. There is no glory in the weight room or out there on the conditioning field. But it will show up at some point. It’s a long season. At some point, the mental toughness, the discipline of the team, always shows up. Those are the things we’re trying to work on.

Martin Luther King – Cleveland’s Glenville High School – 1967
Set out to do a good job and do that job so well that nobody can do it any better. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures.
Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry.
Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music.
Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’

We must keep moving. And so:
If you can’t fly, run.
If you can’t run, walk.
If you can’t walk, crawl.
But by all means, keep moving.

Kevin Millar – 2004 Boston Red Sox
You hear a lot, “What’s chemistry? If you don’t have the players, you don’t have chemistry.” Bull. Bull. You’ve got to pull for each other because you’re not fooling us. You can’t fool your teammates,” Kevin Millar said. “If you feel that someone is pulling against Keith Foulke because he wants to be the closer and doesn’t know his role, you feel that. If you’re pulling against Pedro Martinez because he wants to be the guy, you feel that. We pulled for each other and that’s what was cool.
Those kinds of things you can’t teach. You either have it or you don’t. We had the right mix. We loved each other. It’s hard to explain, but we cared because there were good guys.

E.O. Wilson, Environmental Biologist:
Teams are operating both at the level of the individual, and the level of the group. It binds together individual striving and group success.
Within groups, selfish individuals win. However, groups of altruistic individuals always beat groups of selfish individuals.
There is a sense of profound communion we can feel in these situations of collective euphoria, being lifted out of ourselves.

Championship Teams – David Price, MLB Pitcher
People that don’t understand what team chemistry means don’t work in baseball. It makes me mad, because obviously they don’t know how important it is. Ask the Giants. Ask the Royals. Ask the Cardinals.
You look at the Giants, and they’re not more talented than everyone else every year, but they’re so close, and together. The Cardinals are the same way. They definitely have talent, but they’re no more talented than a lot of the teams they’re beating every day.
The Cardinals are unbelievable. They lose their ace (Adam Wainwright). They lose their No. 3 and No. 4 hitters in (Matt) Adams and (Matt Holliday). And they’re still winning. They’re just unreal.
It’s the same thing as the Royals. Yeah, they have talent, but you can tell how close they are by watching them. I pay attention to all of that.