A Quote by Rod Laver

Staying interested in a match is a lot harder than many people think. Throughout my career, I've always had trouble in the early rounds of a tournament mainly because it was hard for me to psychologically get up until I got to the quarters or the semis. What happened a lot of times is that I would fall behind early, maybe even lose the first couple of sets in a five-set match and then begin to concentrate. Still it wasn't something I could control from the start.
A lot of times we would feed off of the crowd. A lot of things that we were doing in the match was called on the fly. For example, Ric Flair and I would go into a match and have a couple of spots and moments set up. And then, of course, we would line up the finish. But the rest was called on the fly.
I used to either lose in my first or second match or I would go very far in the tournament. So I've been saying to myself, 'Come on, you've got to get through these first two matches. They're very tough. Because afterwards you feel different.' So I'm really putting my energy into getting through to those later rounds.
This game's a lot easier early on in your career because people haven't seen you play. Things got a lot harder when people saw what I did with the ball and began to think about how to bat against me.
Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn't enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, and I didn't even get past the first rounds.
Playing a best of five-set match, you can always bounce back, even if you lose the first set.
He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.
A lot of people get up to the top of the pile, maybe get one No. 1 contender match-up, and if they lose, they drift into obscurity. I lost, and I went back a bit. But I built myself back up. Three times.
It's a lot harder to keep your cool than it is to lose it. That's on any work ethic. Even if you're a big producer on a movie set, or whatever, it's a lot harder to be a pro than be a baby on your crew. That's one work ethic to keep in mind, as one bad apple could give five people a bad day, when that one person could've stepped up their own efforts a little more and not bring anyone else down.
A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.
I recalled how much time i had spent fighting for something i didn't even want. maybe because i had been too lazy to think of other avenues to follow. maybe because i had been afraid of what others would think. maybe because it was hard work to be different. perhaps, because a human being is condemned to repeat the steps taken by the previous generation until a certain number of people begin to behave in a different fashion. then the world changes, and we change with it.
When a drug comes out [that's broadly prescribed] there are going to start to be a lot of people on it [in a million person cohort] and you might get therefore an early signal of something unexpected that hadn't come through in the clinical trials. And I'm sure [drug companies] would love it if, in fact, FDA, recognizing that, would say, OK, maybe you don't have to do your trial with 30,000 people because we're going to find out shortly after registration because we'll have a lot of people taking the drug and we'll be able to see what happened using PMI.
African American boys oftentimes fall behind in school early, start feeling discouraged, check out, drop out, end up on the streets and then get into trouble.
I think I was very lucky that I didn't get well-known until my early thirties. If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already married when all that came along (I got married five months after I got the role as Will).
There were a lot of days when I thought maybe this isn't what I should be doing. There've been a lot of days where you get to the point where you're like, "I don't know if I've got the will to even do this." It's the type of game that doesn't let you walk away so that's what happened, I just kept coming back to it until something really happened for me.
For me, I had that reputation as being a guy that did a lot of stuff early on in my career, but to me, at the time I needed to do that in order to be noticed. Eventually, my style evolved and started making it to where every match wasn't about a dive outside of the ring.
Americans like a winner. If you lose, you're nothing. I'm going to win, though. It's good for the match that Spassky has a plus score against me. We've met five times. He's won three times and we've drawn twice. But I'm a stronger player and a long match favors me.
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