It didn’t open, now I’m down, the players are looking. I got it, I got it.Īnd now finally he said, “Three minutes!” I said, “Fine.” True story, I go to knock the doors open just like Lombardi. And I’m practicing right beside the locker room, the manager’s telling me, “You gotta go in.” Not yet, not yet. The kids I’m coaching are 19, all right? And I’m going to be the greatest coach in the world, the next Lombardi. I said, “That’s beautiful! I’m going to do that.” Your family, your religion and Rutgers basketball. Your family, your religion, and the Green Bay Packers.” And the rest of them, they knocked the walls down, the rest was history. You can focus on three things and three things only. And he said, “Gentlemen, we will be successful this year. And he said, “All eyes on me.”Īnd I’m reading this in his book, I’m getting a picture of Vince Lombardi before his first game. And he walked in and he just walked back and forth like this, just staring at the players. Three minutes before they have to take the field, Lombardi comes in, bangs the door open, and I think you all remember what great presence he had, right? Great presence. His team was wondering, “Where is he? Where’s this great coach?” He’s not there. And I read this thing, Lombardi, what he said was, he didn’t go in, he waited. Speech number 84, you pull them right out, you get ready, get your squad ready. You do your little X and O’s, and then you give the great Knute Rockne talk, we all do. Normally, you get in a locker room, I don’t know, 25 minutes, a half hour before the team takes the field. And I’m reading this, and Lombardi said, he was thinking, “Should it be a long talk? A short talk?” But he wanted to be emotionally, so he said, Be brief.”Īnd this is what he did. And in the book, Lombardi talked about the first time he spoke before his Green Bay Packer team in a locker room, they were perennial losers. And I read this book called Commitment to Excellence by Vince Lombardi. So my idol as a coach was Vince Lombardi. That’s a special place, the locker room, for a coach to give a talk. What was it like the first job you had, right? The very first time you stood in the locker room to give a pep talk. And I was so fired up about my first job. That’s when freshmen played on freshmen teams. That was my first job.Īnd I was the freshman coach. I have to remember the first speech I ever gave. And when I think about getting up and giving a speech, I can’t help it. Those are the three things that I try and do every day. To me, it’s three things: where you started, where you are, and where you’re going to be. I coached against him 15 years, and I always have to think about what’s important in life.
But when I look at Mike, I think we competed against each others as players. He’s meant a lot to me in these last five or six months with my battle. What people don’t realize, he’s a 10 times better person than he is a coach and we know he’s a great coach.
You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.Īnd so, I can’t help … I rode on the plane up today with Mike Krzyzewski, my good friend, and a wonderful coach.
#Dont quit poem printable full#
If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. Could be happiness or joy, but think about it. And number three is you should have your emotions moved to tears. Number two is think, you should spend some time in thought. If we do this every day of our life, you’re going to … What a wonderful … Number one is laugh. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. It comes with the territory, right? We hug, we kiss, we love.Īnd when people say to me, “How do you get through life?” Each day’s the same thing. I can’t help it, that’s being the son of Rocco and Angelina Valvano. Now when I’m fighting cancer, everybody knows that, and people ask me all the time about how you go through your life and, “How’s your day?”Īnd nothing has changed for me, as Dick said. Hopefully at the end, I’ll have something that will be important to other people, too, but I can’t help it. I don’t know how much I have left and I have some things that I would like to say. But as was said on the tape, and also, I don’t have one of those things going with the cue cards, so I’m going to speak longer than anybody else who’s spoken tonight. This is something I certainly will treasure forever. I can’t tell you what an honor it is to even be mentioned the same breath with Arthur Ashe. This speech was originally delivered at the ESPYs on March 4, 1993.
In this speech, given shortly before he died from cancer, Valvano announced the beginning of the V Foundation for Cancer Research.
Jim Valvano (Jimmy V) was an American basketball player, coach, and broadcaster.
0 kommentar(er)
