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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0244, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Gibsonville, North Carolina, native Kay Yow is one of the most accomplished and respected women's basketball coaches in the world. Between 1975 and 2005, her North Carolina State University teams compiled numerous league and tournament titles. In 1988—just a few months after she was diagnosed with breast cancer—she led the 1988 United States women's basketball team to the gold medal in the Seoul Olympics. She was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999. The interview covers many subjects, including Yow's childhood, an extensive discussion of her philosophy of leadership, an account of reactions to her announcement that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and an analysis of the ongoing challenges faced by female athletes and coaches as they seek to broaden their sport's appeal. She paints a portrait of a woman who personifies hard work and high standards, but who has sought to make the most of the circumstances in which she has found herself, rather than pursuing greater opportunities or radical changes. She attributes much of her approach to life and career to lessons taught her by her mother, who instilled both a respect for authority and a knack for looking at the bright side of situations.
Kay Yow, a pioneering women's basketball coach, discusses her childhood in Gibsonville, North Carolina, and her early experiences playing basketball. She discusses her experiences as a coach, her philosophy of leadership, and the challenges facing women's athletics.
[START OF DISC 1, TRACK 1]
I want to start by saying this is Pamela Grundy, and I'm here interviewing Coach Kay Yow here in her office at North Carolina State University. It's the twenty-second of June, 2005, and this is for the Women's Leadership Series.
My first question would be just starting with basketball, what is your first memory of basketball?
My first memory of basketball is when I was seven years old, and at Christmas I got my very own basketball. A goal was put up in my back yard, and it was to stay there for many, many years. It would actually still be there now, but we are renovating my dad and mom's home place, so we took the goal down. But soon it will be replaced, and we're actually laying a full-size court in our back yard. So that's my first memory, getting that basketball, having a goal put up, and from that moment just starting to really entertain myself for hours just trying to put the basketball in the hoop.
Now how did a seven year old girl come to get a basketball hoop for a Christmas present?
Well, I guess my mom and dad both played basketball. My mom played in high school. They both played on mill teams. They both worked in hosiery mills in Burlington, and as a result of their love for basketball and sports it probably didn't hurt them in getting that job because— I have a picture, actually, of my mom somewhere around here in my office on her mill team.
Okay.
So they played basketball as they worked. It's sort of like
an AAU league. Their love for basketball is the reason that I got my
first basketball. However, there was
So you hadn't asked for the basketball or been wanting it?
No, I don't remember asking for it. I think I was wanting a bicycle, and I also got that and a number of other things. Actually, it was my last Christmas as the only child, so I guess they really flooded me because after that [came] another child, and another, and another. We became a larger family, and I learned how to be a good team member.
So how many brothers and sisters do you have?
I have two sisters and one brother.
And did they all play basketball also?
They all played basketball. My brother went to Clemson on a football scholarship, but he played on the varsity high school basketball team, and both of my sisters played basketball. And as a matter of fact they retired number fourteen at Gibsonville High School after my youngest sister finished playing there, and that was the number that I had also worn.
Okay. Okay, so you were well known as the sisters?
The Yow sisters, I think, from Gibsonville, or known sort of like the Holt brothers who both came and played football here at NC State, and both are professional players. They're from Gibsonville, and I think people around that town know the Holt brothers and the Yow sisters are all in basketball.
That's really interesting. What was Gibsonville like at the time that you were growing up?
It's a great small town where the community and the town were completely involved in what was going on at the high school. Very supportive, strong PTA, strong booster's club for athletics. The town came out and supported the students as well as the student athletes at Gibsonville High School. You couldn't hardly go anywhere in Gibsonville or do anything. You'd see that it was truly a village raising the kids because many other adults would tell you what to do and what not to do, and they would also tell your parents. At that time you just didn't question answers. You just answered the questions. And parents were very supportive of people in authority, of coaches and teachers. I always knew I was never going to be right. If the teacher said something or the coach said something, that's the way that it was, and it was up to me to make the adjustment necessary to fit into whatever it was that they were requesting. I might could have had a sound argument on my side, but my parents were just supportive of authority, and I think it helped me greatly.
Did you have any coaches or teachers that you particularly looked up to?
Well, I have to say my freshman coach was a woman named Peggy Gunn. She
is of course married now, and she lives in Greensboro. I
don't see her often, but every once in a while our paths
cross. She was my freshman coach. She stands out in a way because she
sort of got me started at that level. When I was in junior high there
was a lady, Erma Danzler. She taught physical education, and she very
much encouraged me. I kept score for the varsity team so I was really
into watching them, and I looked up to a lot of players on the high
school team when I was in junior high school. Those players also
motivated me in basketball.
That's terrific. You mentioned a little bit earlier you said that having to deal with authority and your parents unquestioned support of that authority had been good for you. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Well, I think just the fact that my parents backed authority gave me a great respect for authority. I knew that there were people in charge, that were in control that had to make decisions, and all decisions they made weren't going to be ones that I always liked. When they set expectations I was to try to live up to those expectations. And even if I thought that the expectation was wrong or should be something else, they were in authority, and they had expressed it, and that's what I was to try to do. My parents always supported authority in that way. I never had the feeling like, 'you're not on my side.' They tried to explain to me what expectations were. And when people laid them out and there are rules and regulations and guidelines, that's what you do. There is a process to change those things, but just not to do them is not the process.
Right.
Or to do something else and do it a different way without changing the
guidelines, or the policies is not the way to go about it. I think my
mom was an especially great encourager, had a very positive outlook. Her
attitude was unbelievable, and she
That's terrific to have somebody behind you that way and really doing that. Did most of the people in Gibsonville work at the mills? Was that what people did, or did they—what did people in Gibsonville do?
I would say that many of the people in Gibsonville worked in mills. We
had hosiery mills, textile mills and also they were farmers. A lot of
them raised large crops of tobacco. When I was a kid, a number of
summers I spent making money putting in tobacco, so I know: I was a
hander. I worked early in the morning until really dark at night. We
were hanging the tobacco that we had tied up that day in the barns. That
was
Have many members of your family gone to college?
My mom and dad didn't go to college, but my brother went to college. He did not complete his degree. But myself and [my] other two sisters went to college. I went on. I got a masters degree. My middle sister got a masters and then a doctorate, and then my youngest sister has worked on her masters partially and is still in that process.
So your parents hadn't gone to college, but did you think that was your goal from a young age to go to college?
It's something that my parents wanted: something for their children that they hadn't had the opportunity to do. There is no way that either one of them could have gone to college. They came from fairly large families, seven children each, and they came through the Depression, and there was no way that they could. They wanted this for their children. I was greatly influenced by the three teachers that I had in high school, and since two were English and one was math, I really wanted to go to college to be an English teacher. I attribute that specific part to those teachers that I had because I loved English, and it was basically because of these teachers. So I had a goal. I guess I started thinking about it when I was in high school, and I was influenced in that direction by my teachers, and my parents always wanted that for me. I'm the oldest child in my family, so I always wanted to please my parents. That was something I really wanted to do and just felt that I should do because they had always said that I should do it.
Let's go back to basketball for a minute. In Gibsonville obviously the high schools and I guess the junior highs had a boy's team and a girl's team. Was there a difference in how those two teams were viewed?
Well, it's interesting because I went to Gibsonville High
School which was a Guilford County high school. Just six miles away was
Burlington, and Walter Williams High School in Burlington was a city
school. There were no teams for girls at Walter Williams High School,
but six miles away in a county school [there were]. In Alamance, where
Burlington is, they had county schools, and they had teams, but not the
city school. It's interesting because if I had just lived six
miles away within a city, I would not have had the opportunity to play.
But because I went to Gibsonville High School, a county school, I had
that opportunity. The gym was packed for both the boy's and
the girl's games. At that time you played the
girl's varsity and the boy's varsity games
together, and then the JV's played their games together. It
was packed for both, just supported. The community and the town
supported both teams. I felt we had a great opportunity, and high school
would not have been anything like high school to me if I
hadn't been playing basketball. It added something to that
total experience that was unbelievable, and if I hadn't had
it, I would have missed so much. But there weren't college
teams so I was never thinking about really going to college. I just
accepted it didn't exist. I didn't expect it. I
mean that's the way that was. So when I was in college I
always felt like something was missing, and it wasn't until
after I graduated from college, [when] I got a job and I started
coaching that I realized it had
What did you like about basketball? Why did you like it so much?
I think that I like basketball. That just happens to be my sport. It
could have been another sport, but I think it was just the challenge
that sport brings. I thrive on the challenge of it. Working to become
the best that you can become, to develop whatever talents you have to
your potential, and then to go out and test them against someone else.
It's just a challenge, and it's fun. I just have a
love for competition, and I feel it's a love in the right
direction because I think competing with people rather than against
people, it's just a mindset. It's how you arrange
your mind about competition. I don't think you can perform as
well when you go out with a mindset, 'I'm going to
complete against these people.' It's nothing
against anybody that you're competing with, but
that's what you're doing, competing with them. You
just give the best that you have and they give the best they have, and
if at the end you've even gotten a little bit better because
of that experience in itself. You know there can be only one winner on
the score board, but there could be all winners, as people. I realized
this early on: if you give the best that you have that when
it's all said and done you may have a disappointment on the
score board, but there are other ways to win. Trying and giving your
best is the greatest way to win because you may be disappointed, but
really if you did give your best and you played really well, after a
period of time you feel good, long term, that you did that. It was sort
of like striving to be valedictorian. It is the same type of thing. In
the end you want to be able to, as people say, 'look yourself
in the mirror and just know that you've given your
best.'
When I got my masters— I did my masters, rather than doing it in English I did it in physical education, and I also got an undergraduate certification in physical education while I was there. I went on a two year program to get it across the board. When I was getting those degrees they said these qualities and characteristics, they're not just caught. They have to be taught. But if you have a great leader there will be teachable moments, many of them, because sport involves the emotions so much. It involves every part of a person. In English you just didn't always see the total person involved in the classroom, but on the court every part of us is involved, and it all plays a part in the end for the results.
That's really interesting, and really gets to the subject of what we are talking about which is leadership, and I guess you went to college, and then you came out and got a job teaching and coaching. Is that right?
Yes.
And I guess that's when you started to then be the role model for the girls that you were coaching. I'm curious what you went about trying to teach them especially early on when you were just starting to be a coach. What were your goals for your team?
Well, I think when I first started out coaching I didn't really have a mentor. I think this is one of the things that I missed, because there were very few women coaches. Actually I really didn't know one, personally. Then I hadn't been trained to be a coach. So I was sort of on my own, except the men's coach at Allen Jay High School where my first job was. He had coached women and men for thirteen years.
Okay.
Okay, and had had championship teams, so he was great. He said he would
help me learn how to draw up practices. Actually, he would sit on the
bench with me during games until I felt more comfortable. He was very
willing to help me. He was a very fundamental coach. He was an excellent
coach. So this was a person who started helping me. But after a while I
started being able to do the practices, and he felt I could be on my own
for the games more. He helped whenever I asked questions, but he had his
own team and his own program. So I attended clinics. I read books. I
looked at films about basketball. I learned on my own. I just had to go
out there and ask the questions and try to learn, and that's
what I did. I think that today, women going into coaching have a greater
opportunity because they have many people who could be role models now,
and many of them actually played at the high school, college level, AAU;
they've run through a number of coaches, and so they were
very fortunate. Somebody like Sue Gunter who played AAU—I
didn't
You were really a pioneer in terms of being a female coach. Did you think of yourself that way? Did you have a sense that you were doing something that women really hadn't done before?
I guess I never thought of myself as a pioneer. I think I was just
trying to survive, trying to get better. I'm big on people
not just getting by, but getting better.
Over these forty years of coaching and learning, how would you describe the leadership style that you've developed?
Well, my philosophy on leadership—leadership is influence,
and even greater, it's an inspiring influence. I'd
have to say my leadership is probably based a lot on the word love. I
have a strong faith, and in the Bible, in First Corinthians, chapter
thirteen, there's a chapter that describes love, that entire
chapter. It has a section where it starts saying love is kind, love is
patient, love is self control, and when you go through that if you think
of what they are talking about, or what God is talking about love to be,
[it's] a leader. You can put, 'a leader is
kind.' 'A leader is patient.'
'A leader is self control.' 'A leader
is honest and truthful.' A leader is all of these things, and
I feel that if leadership is based in love and service, this is my idea.
There's nothing within me that thinks of a leader as being a
boss or just having power through position like telling people what to
do just because you have the position.
Does this go back to your mother at all when you think about how you developed this or how you came to have this belief?
Yes, my mother was a role model for sure. She's a person that
I definitely would follow, because I know that she had my own best
interest at heart, and I think that that's what people have
to know about you as a leader. When you know somebody has your own best
interest at heart, even when some tough decisions are made, some that
you don't agree with and you don't like, you are
still willing to go along with it in the end because you believe in that
person. You know that they care about you. There's a saying
that people don't care how much you know until they know how
much you care about them, and when they know how much you care about
them they want to know everything, and that's the thing you
want people to know. It has to be genuine. It can't be fake,
and that's why being real—and people know the
difference between real and fake. When it is genuine, people know it you
have that kind of spirit. People want to follow you. You have to have an
expertise in the field, but even if you didn't have expertise
but people knew you really cared about them, it's amazing. I
think you'd still be able to—it's much
Do you think there's anything distinctly female about your leadership style or your philosophy. Do you have any?
I think that many people would think that it is because I can think that
people would. There would be many men who would say you can't
be this way or that way. You have to be stern. You have to be. But tough
love is being firm. It's not like you just have a love, do
what you want. We're not talking about that. We're
talking about developing responsible people, people that are
accountable, people who don't settle for just being good. As
John F. Kennedy said, "the greatest enemy of excellence is
good." There are people who [think] good is good enough, so
they don't want any more. We're not talking about
that. We're talking about a tough love in that
you're demanding that. But, you know what? You're
not in it for yourself. You're in it for the right reasons,
to serve and to help other people to become all that they can become,
and you see them for who they can become and not for who they are right
now, where they are right now. You see them for who they can be and who
they can become if you just stick with them. Because this one is all
about making people do what they don't want to do so that
they can become who they want to become, and you as a leader know this.
So I'm talking about a tough love. But no, to me no,
it's not about women. I would like to see this kind of
leadership across the board for everybody who leads. The leader is a
part of the team, not somebody who sits up here outside the circle and
just drops down, commands, or thinks of themselves more highly than they
should. I think a leader should be a part of the team. It's
just like a chain. If you make a chain into
Did you come to this over a long period of time, sort of understanding this, or did it seem to come fairly naturally to you early on to see leadership and teamwork in this way?
Well, I think the Lord blessed me with a love for people. That was the
first thing, so that helped. But it is an ever evolving thing, and it
would have helped me if I had had a role model who could sit down with
me and explain to me the things that they had learned through their
experiences. Not that I would have to go out and do it exactly that way,
but I would have a lot to think about because as that person would talk,
I would think, 'I'm not thinking exactly that
way,' and so it would give me a lot to mull over, and I might
come to some different conclusions. But even at this point, after
coaching forty years, I am still learning about leadership, and it is
still evolving, and I am still working on areas that are weak for me to
become stronger in. There are many areas, and as you deal with so many
different situations day in and day out, sometimes I disappoint myself.
I wish that I had not responded in the way that I responded. It
wasn't the way I wanted to and the way that I should have.
But it's still, even at this time in my life, it's
like I'm not
Let's go back for a minute to—because this is all very interesting, and I think the confrontation may be tied back into some earlier experience. Obviously once you became a high school coach then you became a college coach, and you're really pioneering in that field. I'm interested in what some of the obstacles you encountered as one of these early women's coaches, and how you went about trying to deal with them.
Well, at first there were many obstacles, so I don't even
know where to begin. When I went to Elon it was my first college
coaching job, and there was no money in the budget. So we had to pay our
own gas, and buy our own food, buy our own shorts, tee shirts, whatever.
I remember we didn't have money. But see, the whole thing
then was not to look at all that we didn't have but to look
at what we did have. I mean, we did have an opportunity to play. Just a
few years earlier, people didn't have that opportunity. So we
have to focus a little on what we do have. At least we have this
opportunity so we have to be grateful for that. Not that we stop working
for having more. We could have a case; we should have much more because
we've been all these years without anything, so we know that.
But at the same time we've got to operate day to day, and you
can't get everything over night. So it's a matter
of understanding that. Don't forget what you do have, and
then just work in the right way to get what you don't have. I
remember my players at Elon. They wanted warm ups so badly. I went to
the track and field coach, and I talked to him about—I
can't remember if they were getting new warm ups or if their
season was over, but they had these warm ups, and I asked him, they
weren't using them at the time. I asked him if we could use
the warm ups for our team. His name was Jerry Tolley, and he agreed, and
gave us those warm ups to use. Those warm ups were for track and field.
They're for being worn outside. They were
Were there ever points where you ever just got fed up with that part in terms of trying to get what you could by asking people rather than having all the extra resources added that you really did need?
Well, you know, we're still striving today in some areas.
It's not something that can be solved over night.
We've come a long ways, and yet we still have a good ways to
go. Money is always a problem. You can legislate a lot of things but you
can't legislate attitude. I find that to be the most
important thing because if you have people who have the attitude, great
attitude toward women in sports, often these people will find a way to
get things done. Even if they can't do it at the first class
level, they find a way to make it happen and help you no matter what,
just because they feel it's the right thing to do and
it's the best thing to do. I think that is a key more than
anything else. We still have to have Title IX in force. We could never
do without that I don't think at this point in time in
history. Maybe there will come a day when we no longer need Title IX so
Can you talk a little about the changes? You talk this effort to cultivate a positive attitude toward women in sports, sort of what the attitudes towards women's sports generally were when you started here at NC State and what has changed, and maybe what has not changed about broader university and community perspectives towards women in sports?
When we first started you always had people who were in favor of having
women's sports programs. There are always those people there.
The difference is today there is a greater number of people across the
university, within the community, within the boosters' Wolf
Pack Club. I think across the board there are many more people who are
in favor of women in sport now, and in the beginning there were just
fewer numbers because it was new. I mean here are some
people—Willis Casey who hired me was convinced this was
something NC State needed to do, so therefore he stepped out and hired
me as the first full-time woman coach in the state. This was because he
believed it was the right thing to do. He believed that, and there were
some others who believed that, but there were other people who just
thought, you know, 'women in sports. We don't need
that.' Or other people who would think, 'well,
it's okay to have a women's team but we just
don't need to put that much emphasis on it.'
That's just people. But today there are many more people who
believe that women should participate in sports. They believe that they
can, and they can do it at a high level. They believe in the qualities
and
Do you think that there are ways in which that's particularly important for young women given other things that young women are taught by culture and society about what they ought to be?
Well, I think in sports, to be successful you have to be more assertive.
You have to be more aggressive. You can't be passive and not
make decisions, and just lay back. You have to step up. You have to
bring something to the table so to speak, and you have to be a
contributing member. People are depending on you to contribute your
talents and your abilities to the team so that we can be the best that
we can be. I would think one of the biggest qualities is aggressiveness,
because how can you play the game of basketball well and at a high level
and not be aggressive? But you can learn. There are times to be
aggressive. There are times to be more aggressive. There are times to be
less aggressive, and that is all within sport itself. When you step off
the court from practice then there's no need for the kind of
aggressiveness that you needed when you were tackling that task on the
court. But you may find in life other tasks that you need to be more
aggressive, more assertive in order to have the results and the outcome
that you
And you those are particular qualities that are especially good for young women to learn, needing to learn?
I think so, yes. For women I do, because discipline and commitment is across the board for everybody, and guys tend to be more aggressive and more assertive. They may learn through sports to be less so, because you have to have self control. You absolutely have to have self control so it can work both ways, and you have to have respect for authority. You have officials in the game, and you have coaches, and you represent not only yourself, your family, your team, your university, your athletic department, you represent all of these things so you learn expectations for when you represent. So, yes, I would think aggressiveness and assertiveness just come to my mind immediately as a little different qualities than a lot of people think of women possessing.
Well, you know over these years you, and other coaches, and other universities—I mean there's wonderful women's teams in North Carolina, women's college teams. It's really just terrific. What effect have you seen that having on girls in North Carolina, having these prominent teams and these achieving women? Do you see evidence of that having an effect on young women in North Carolina?
Well, I have to believe that it does have an effect on a number of girls
in our state. I know when we go out to talk to forty to fifty middle
schools a year that every once in a while I receive a letter from a
parent who says that one of our players was at her child's
school that day, and that she said something to her child that just
impacted her, and
We're taking a lot of time, and I know you're busy and need to get back, but I did have a couple of more questions that I wanted to ask. I think first, what do you think are the major obstacles that women's basketball and women's sports faces today? What are kind of the challenges you see to overcome in terms of just the broader progress of women's sports beyond the great progress it has made to this point?
Well, to make greater progress it also could create some difficult
situations for us. To make greater progress— I personally
believe that it's all tied up in media. I think
that's where it is, and we can continue to have the best
teams that we can have. We can continue developing women players and
getting them to higher levels, have better coaches. I think better
coaches all the way down. I still don't think we have across
the board the kind of great coaches in every high school, junior high,
rec leagues. I don't think every rec league has a league for
young girls, so we've got all of that to do. We just need to
keep working on developing better women's players. But even
now, let's say, we get all that done, we still
won't be there if the media doesn't warm up to us
a little more, because every once in a while they show a few games. And
we have the greatest ACC television package we've ever had,
we were on TV a lot last year. It's just that you
can't count on it year in and year out, and you start to get
a good package, and then maybe you're on ESPN, and then they
move you to ESPN 2, and then you move to the next ESPN station that they
put on. And then ESPN is just showing men's sports. Media.
Just like what about in the paper even today, 2005: we can't
get a box score for our women's games. We don't
have— when you see who won the ACC games. You'd
like to see how many minutes each of their players played, how they shot
the ball, their percentage, we don't have a box score. We
just have a little line down there that might give the leading
Such as?
Well, we become so much more visible. So many more people know what is happening with basketball. Then people want to get involved in it, and then everything with men's sports and men's basketball become our challenges. Everything. All of it.
Right. Money, recruiting.
Yes. Money, recruiting, everything. People have higher expectations because of more visibility. More people, then more temptation to get in the gray area for recruiting and then need more money. That's just the bad part, so, who knows. I don't know what's best. I wouldn't really want to make that call. I feel my call is to put out the best team that I can possibly put out, and hope that people will enjoy watching their performance, and that we can share it with people because the more people you have I think it raises the standard of play. When the gym is packed and we're playing, that's some of the best women's games. And I think that's why men play consistently at a high level. Every men's team doesn't have packed gyms.
Right.
But when the house is packed people playing know a lot is expected of
them. And when you know a lot is expected of you you try to rise to the
occasion. When
That's really interesting. That just says a lot. You know there's still just so many people, and some of these media people may be among them, that just still lack respect for women's sports for whatever reason. What do you think can be done to change that if anything?
Well, I don't know. I think it's a societal
problem. It's almost like we need a psychiatrist, a
sociologist, we need a social science person. We need all these people
together to answer this question for us. I really feel that way. I would
like for them to tell us why they won't accept women in
sports. I'm not really sure of the people who are just head
strong against women in sport. Everything that we have used to justify
men in sports in higher institutions of learning has been about what
they will get from the experience, the qualities and characteristics
that will be developed to help them to be a success, and that
they're the lifeline and sort of the heartbeat of the
university. They are the school spirit. It's where it comes
from. So why that wouldn't be for all people is an absolute
mystery to me. It's just a societal, attitudinal problem. It
will take generations to erase that, and we simply can't, I
feel, do that much about it for those people until other generations
come, and when they come into the world this is just the way it is. They
don't
Kids grow up in Gibsonville knowing that girls played, but people other places didn't.
They didn't. There's too many people who it just doesn't seem right to them. They didn't know it that way—and change. People have a hard time with change. They cannot view change as an opportunity. They do not have that viewpoint about change. Change to them is bad, and it was good enough this way so why are we wanting to do something different? But the people who can view change as an opportunity, they're with us. I'm just guessing we'll have to wait a number of generations.
If you look back just at your life and think about the seven year old who got this basketball, and where you've come, and all that you've done, what thoughts come to your mind, how all this happened?
Well, the first thought is that I've been really blessed, and
I don't understand it. I don't know how.
I'd never planned on coaching basketball, and I certainly
never planned to leave high school and go to college. Once I got to Elon
I never planned to come to NC State, but then the people talked me into
applying for this position. I was always happy where I was. I think
happiness is a choice and is a state of the mind, and you can just
decide ahead of time that you're going to be happy. It
doesn't depend on anything else but just a choice you make. I
know this because I read this story about an elderly lady who was
legally blind. Her husband just passed away, and they were moving her
into an assisted living home. As they were coming in to the facility the
ladies started to tell her about the decorations and
One of the things that happened, obviously some years ago, you're known throughout the state as a basketball coach, and around the world obviously as a basketball coach, the Olympics and all the other things you've done, and then you've become very well known for having breast cancer. Could you talk about that a little bit in terms of leadership and being in the public eye on that?
I felt like it was really important for me to step forth and to say what
was going on in my life. In August of '87 when my breast
cancer was first diagnosed, there
It sounds like in a way it's not that different from being a coach, sort of what you try to accomplish with talking about it.
Well, I know this: so many of the qualities and characteristics it takes
in sport are very valuable in the fight against cancer. My faith is
always—whether I'm a coach or whether
I'm fighting cancer—my faith is at the forefront.
I'm first just leaning and trusting on God, but He has given
me a competitive spirit and determination, and I realize this is the
toughest foe I'm facing. My arch rivals in basketball are
tough, but they
This has just been terrific. I appreciate it so much. Is there anything else that you think is important about—I'm sure there are many things—but is there anything that comes in mind that seems important to say at this point about your career, and leadership, or just anything?
No. I just think of things, like for people who might lead,
there's—let me think about how I want to say this.
The people who are willing to go the extra mile, it's not a
road traveled as much, and it's not crowded there, and I
think people who are going to lead really have to get on that road.
Nothing will ever replace hard word, industriousness. It's
more than the willingness. Willingness sort of has a connotation of,
'okay, I'll do it.' But maybe your
heart's not in it fully, but you're willing to do
it. But eagerness on the other hand connotes your heart is in it, and I
think that that eagerness to work hard really changes everything. All
along the way, I had friends who always used to say to me (they
don't say it any more but they used to say early on),
"why do you work so much?
How do you do that? How do you remember your roots?
Well, I'll tell you. You remember your roots. After you remember your roots you really need to reach out and help other people. If you get in this cycle then you have a chance to continue success, I think. But without that cycle I think you're teetering. I think it won't stay there as long. Remember your roots, well, because there's been so many people that helped you along the way, and all of a sudden if you just start thinking that you're doing it, that's a dangerous mindset because nobody does something great without somebody else. I mean, what does one person do that's great? I don't think that happens. I think you have people along the way. I used to say in some speeches that they dug wells and we drink from those wells, and they built fires and we were warmed by those fires. And now after you have success you have to dig wells that others might drink from and build fires that others might be warmed by. It's a responsibility, and service. I once read a thing that said the first third of your life is about—wait a minute. Can we stop just a minute? Let me think about this because this I would like to share.
Okay.
Okay. I've got it. I wanted to be sure I had it in my mind.
I once read something that said the first third of your life is about
learning. The second third is about earning, and the third part is about
returning. Somehow I sort of think there's a lot of truth in
that, though I think learning is a lifetime process so you never stop,
but perhaps the main focus early is learning, and then you have that
period of your life the main focus is earning, and then the last, the
main focus is returning or serving,
Well, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
I appreciate this.
Lots of things come to my mind but—.
END OF INTERVIEW