I think the biggest thing I want to learn from Kevin Garnett, with him having a ring, is how do I become a championship player? How do I see how a championship team looks like? How do I use myself to be a championship contributor?
I come from a minimum wage working world, as we all did for at least some part of our lives, and that is never out of my rearview. I've never forgotten how much your feet hurt after you've stood on them for like 12 hours. And how the drudgery of a job you hate craps on your entire life; how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, and it really was getting to me.
I think you can get too focused on the championship and forget how rewarding it is to be part of a team.
What makes a good team is putting the pieces together and make it work. As a veteran, it's part of my job to make that work. Seeing where and how the young talent has to sacrifice something for the team.
I think it all comes down to relationships - how I treat my wife, how I treat my kids, how I treat the guys at the grocery store, all aspects of every day, what I'm involved in.
That's the one regret I have in all the years that I've played professional sports, that I didn't win a championship in the N.F.L. And that's why you play on any level of team sports: you want to win a championship as part of a team.
There's a lot of music nowadays with people singing about how amazing their clothes are and how incredible their shoes are and how much jewelry they might be wearing or how much jewelry they want, how much money they have and the club that they're in and the alcohol that they're drinking. I think that's showing off. I don't think it's necessarily all that honest or all that interesting.
I've learned so much whether it was, I played a lot of team sports, so being part of a team, learning how to be a leader on different teams, and how to deal with the ebb and flow of different games.
The player who is almost at the same age as my daughter... I treat all my team-mates as brothers and I treat him just like a team-mate. I embrace them all and I am always around them giving advice because this is part of my job as a team captain and friend. I don't make them feel the gap in the age because I believe this should be normal.
I think winning a championship, for me, it put things in perspective. You can either be a great player on a so-so team, or you can be a role player on a championship team, or, in an extreme case, a great player on a championship team.
Most everything that you want is just outside your comfort zone." "Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it." "Our job is not to figure out the 'how'. The 'how' will show up out of the commitment and believe in the 'what
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it
At the close of life the question will be not how much have you got, but how much have you given; not how much have you won, but how much have you done; not how much have you saved, but how much have you sacrificed; how much have you loved and served, not how much were you honored.
After I left the Nets, I found out what it takes to not just make the Finals, but to win a championship. I think I have a sense now of how you build a championship structure and how you maintain that structure.
How far you go depends on what you want for yourself, how much you're willing to leave on the floor, and how much you wanna face the fears you have inside of you. It's everything we're all dealing with every day.
Sometimes we are much better at judging people based on how they treat everyone other than ourselves. We make a million excuses for why they treat us how they do.