A Quote by Stan Van Gundy
What I find fascinating … you have to give David Stern and the NBA a lot of credit … ESPN pays the league, and then the league tells them what to do. It’s more ESPN’s problem. You gotta have no balls whatsoever to pay someone hundreds of millions of dollars and let them run your business.
Related Quotes
I have to give a lot of credit to David Stern to open up the league, but also in my case, Jerry West and Dr. Buss that had the vision of international guys making it to the NBA.
You can criticize ESPN for a lot of things, but one thing you have to give them credit for is their willingness to put women in nontraditional roles.
It'll be up to ESPN when I leave. And when ESPN says they're going to move in another direction, I'll say, 'Thank you very much. It's been a great run.' Because it has.
I got fired - November 8, 1979. And all of a sudden, I got a call, two weeks later, about doing a game on ESPN. And I truly said - Scotty Connal, the head of ESPN production at the time, was the guy that called me - I said, 'Man, ESPN sounds like a disease. What is ESPN? I know nothing about it, never heard of it.'
Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they'll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I'm sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.
I believe if the players and coaches respect my viewpoint of the game, then fans will as well. And full credit there goes to the NBA and to ESPN. They are willing to put people like me in a position to do this.
You always think as an organization, obviously if you're in sports, you want to be with ESPN. ESPN is it. But you don't really realize how good ESPN is and how big their platform really is until you're in it.
As a serial investor who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups, I know that the business plans coming out of incubators tend to be vetted and more thoroughly validated. The incubator's input into your business plan will make you look far more polished and experienced - even if you have never run a business before.
Yes, I did move to New York when I was eighteen to do sports broadcasting. I didn't know how I was going to do it, so I got a job at ESPN Zone, thinking I would meet people in the business. People give me a hard time for it, but they don't realize that they shot 'Sports Reporter' there and that folks from ESPN and ABC were in there all the time.
Did I think it was hypocritical that a professional league making hundreds of millions of dollars off beer sponsorships was telling me not to drink? Yes.
I can't believe what I said about myself. What I said in my own private conversations with myself to an ESPN producer are my business, and I had no business saying them to someone else.
I think the problem for the future generations is a lot of people ain't takin' the time to look for them and give them their voice, so therefore for their voice to be heard, they gotta bang more pots on the ceiling, so to speak; they gotta do crazy things just to get recognized. I just feel that whenever you don't give a generation some kind of voice, then expect side effects.
Normally a summer league is a dry run for training camp, gives the guys an idea what training camp looks like, and then summer league, you're not really playing against NBA rotation type players, so not a good example of the talent level you'll be facing, but the fall practices give you a good head start.
I'm passionate about the game - just like the fans are, and I've coached in the league for a long time, so that's the perspective I will bring to ESPN.
I watch ESPN all day. If you come into my trailer, ESPN is on. That's the first thing I do when I leave the set.
It was tough getting fired by the NBA. I really didn't know where I was going, until [ESPN] called me. I said, "Hey, 'ESPN?' Never heard of it. It sounds like a disease." Now I have that same disease as a sports fanatic. All this sports madness we didn't have years ago, now I'm very blessed and fortunate to be part of it.
Related Authors
Alex Ferguson Quotes
Scottish
Coach
Arsene Wenger Quotes
French
Coach
Bear Bryant Quotes
American
Coach
Bobby Knight Quotes
American
Coach
Buck Brannaman Quotes
American
Coach
Harry Redknapp Quotes
English
Coach
John Calipari Quotes
American
Coach
John Wooden Quotes
American
Coach
Jose Mourinho Quotes
Portuguese
Coach
Lou Holtz Quotes
American
Coach
Mike Krzyzewski Quotes
American
Coach
Nick Saban Quotes
American
Coach
Pat Summitt Quotes
American
Coach
Pep Guardiola Quotes
Spanish
Coach
Tony Dungy Quotes
American
Coach
Vince Lombardi Quotes
American
Coach