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I've never felt my job was to win basketball games - rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life.

Bobby Knight

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Bobby Knight
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: October 25
Basketball Coach
Basketball Player
Coach
Massillon
Ohio
Robert Montgomery Knight
Bobby Knight
The General
Give
Necessary
Coach
Everything
Succeed
Coaching
Giving
Player
Background
Never
Winning
Backgrounds
Life
Games
Coaches
Rather
Players
Jobs
Basketball
Felt
Essence

More quotes by Bobby Knight

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I don't have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.
Bobby Knight
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People want national championship banners. People want to talk about Indiana being competitive. How do we get there? We don't get there with milk and cookies.
Bobby Knight
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If universities want to save a little money, they ought to make some cutbacks in administration and in faculty people who teach one class a week.
Bobby Knight
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In my dealings with the press, I was like the guy who goes into the cathouse and the madam gets him prepared and looks at him and says, Who are you going to satisfy with that? And he looks back at her and says, Me. That's kind of my sense of humor at times.
Bobby Knight
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All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
Bobby Knight
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I always designed my practice plans the night before and then made tweaks a few hours before practice began
Bobby Knight
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Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.
Bobby Knight
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When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'
Bobby Knight
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America has the greatest reputation in the world for helping others whenever and wherever disaster strikes. Now, more than ever,it's important for us to contribute to those who are in need. Your assistance is really beneficial and will be greatly welcomed and appreciated.
Bobby Knight
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When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.
Bobby Knight
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At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven't called walking for 20 years, now you don't know what it is. When you call walking, you're about half right.
Bobby Knight
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Writing was far more of an art in the sports world than it is now.
Bobby Knight
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As coaches we talk about two things: offense and defense. There is a third phase we neglect, which is more important. It's conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense.
Bobby Knight
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Don't fight the rabbits. If you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you.
Bobby Knight
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The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
Bobby Knight
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There are times when my passion for basketball led me into confrontations that I could have handled a lot better. I've always been too confrontational, especially when I know I'm right.
Bobby Knight
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The red I wear is Indiana's red, not Moscow's red. Indiana was here long before communism.
Bobby Knight
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I have always maintained that in basketball the importance of the mental to the physical is about four to one.
Bobby Knight
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I think that it's perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don't want defeat. We don't want defeat in sport. We don't want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What's going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?
Bobby Knight
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So when I hear a guy after a game-winning home run say or gesture that God was on his side, I think to myself, 'He's saying God screwed the pitcher.
Bobby Knight