I'm a bit surprised that the Raiders turned to Art Shell to be their new head coach, not because Shell isn't a good head coach - he had success before as the Raiders' head coach - but because he's been away from the game so long and the game has changed a lot in those years.
Experience shows that those people who were selected to be a head coach in the NFL met with more success if they had had head-coaching experience.
I was a 52-year-old coach. But people don't realize I had 25 years as a head coach. Most coaches my age only had a few years as head coach. I had six years at Miami of Ohio, eight years at Northwestern, 11 at Notre Dame.
The burdens of being a head coach are different from being an assistant. If I had been an assistant coach for awhile, then become a head coach, I probably would have lasted longer.
I learned a tremendous amount about what was important to me as a head coach in that I was not in charge. I didn't have final say about what was going on, and I was always having to represent other people's views, and it was very difficult to be real, to be authentic, to be true because there were a number of people who had say about what was going on.
Phil Griffin, who happens to be the head of MSNBC, is not a liberal or progressive. I worked at MSNBC; I talked to Phil Griffin many times. I know Phil Griffin. He is not remotely progressive. All he cares about is success in his own career.
I really wasn't expecting to fall so hard for Phil. As a matter of fact, when my dad said he was talking to Phil Jackson about him coming to L.A. to coach the Lakers, I tried to argue against it.
I'm based in Stockholm and I train at Nexus Fighter Centre, it's my club and my head coach Andreas Michael but for two weeks now I went to Vegas to train with Team Alliance with coach Eric Del Fierro, Phil Davis and top level guys. I had top level sparring so I'm more than ready.
People's perception changes so fast. You win, and people say, 'Well, he had all of those sanctions at USC, and that's why he lost.' You lose, and, 'OK, he's a bad head coach, and he's just a good play-caller wherever he has been.'
I probably would have no capability of absorbing a 60-defeat season as a coach. It would be a foreign experience. My whole career, even as a player, has been on winning basketball clubs and it just seems to have been a part of the make-up of what’s been given me. That’s what I’ve been given and that’s what I’ve had to deal with. Some people can make fun of it or some people can have a good time with it, or some people can resent it. It’s just what it is.
I feel like I've been very blessed to have some great mentors through the years, starting with Don James, who was my college coach, who really inspired me to want to be a coach, which is not something that I really had in mind.
I think it's really important that we get an experienced staff. Guys that have been a head coach, to me, at some level is important to me. I value head coaching just because it's good to know what it's like to be the decision maker.
My whole success is I've always been designing for people, first because I wanted to sell them merchandise. Then when I got into hotels, I had to rethink, what am I selling now? You're selling a good time.
Here's the thing. You can't get ten thousand hours of skiing. You spend so much time on the chairlift. My coach did a calculation of how many hours I've been on snow. We'd been overestimating. I think we came up with something like eleven total hours of skiing on snow a year. It's, like, seven minutes a day.
I've always been surprised when a straight guy likes me. It's just been like my whole life has been kinda like that. I definitely felt like when I started writing music, it wasn't writing for a gay audience at all. I was just writing for me. But what I say whenever I get this question is my best friends have always been gay, I've always been, as a person, just accepted by the gay community, and celebrated and had the best nights of my life at gay clubs. Always had a fashion sense usually with drag and I don't know. That's just kind of my people. That's just kind of where I fit in.
Christian guys had a reputation for being soft or not being tough enough to play the game. But every chapel we've had, our team fighter has been in there. Stu Grimson is very outspoken. Dan Bylsma, the head coach at Pittsburgh, was one guy that really helped me a lot.