Andre Iguodala Quotes

So I grew up learning a balance. On the one hand, it was “Yes, ma’am. No, sir.” On the other hand, it was a deep sense that you simply couldn’t let people fuck with you.

You can’t have respect for people who haven’t earned it. That’s pretty much the number one way to become a loser. This world is full of people who demand that you live by their rules and try to hate you for not doing that, even though there’s literally nothing in their lives proving that what they’re doing works. It’s crazy.

A basketball player has to play for free for at least a year, a football player for three years before they are eligible to earn an income. But sports like tennis, baseball, golf, and even hockey allow kids to go pro whenever they want. Is it a coincidence that these are overwhelmingly white sports while basketball and football are not?

There was a psychological benefit to a coach who saw you as an adult professional and who prioritized helping you along with your career above all else. It was respect. Respect as a human, respect as an adult, respect as a professional. Mark Jackson had that and it made you not only play better but feel better.

I would learn that the higher up you go in this game, the more replaceable you become.

Our town was full of stories like that, of people who had, through some combination of fate and inertia, ended up with lives they didn’t quite choose or wouldn’t have chosen.

So confidence is really the thing that makes the difference between winning and losing. When I look back at my career, I can see now that each milestone I hit wasn’t so much a milestone of technical ability, though there were those. They were really milestones of personal belief.

But these towns have an inertia to them. A dangerous lethargy. You meet someone, you get saddled with kids, money is tight, magnificent opportunities are not exactly knocking at your door. You take a job to make ends meet. You realize you’d save so much if you moved back in with your own mother. You mean for it to be temporary, but one thing leads to another. It’s insidious. Springfield is a town that if you just let your life naturally occur, you’ll be stuck there until the day you die. I liken it to freezing to death.

But I’ve noticed over the years that the people screaming the loudest about following the rules are always the people who benefit from them.

The coach is making seven figures. The assistants are making six figures. TV networks are making billions. And yet the players who are grinding their bodies into nothing, sacrificing kneecaps and ligaments on a daily basis, who are the only people anyone tunes in to watch, are earning the equivalent of $40,000 per year? And that’s not even in cash but it’s in a “service”? That’s like being offered the most physically dangerous job on a staff where everyone else is making six or seven figures, and you’re supposed to risk your health and be the face of the company for a compensation package of $40,000 in gift certificates.

You were to give your opponent respect, but not too much respect. “You’re a killer just like they’re a killer,” he would say. “So go out there and kill them.

If we make enough money, have enough success, then we should be free from all struggles—or more accurately, our struggles are no longer valid. But what most of us find after a while, and much to our surprise, is that even with all the cash and prizes, the question of purpose remains. Pain and suffering still remain.

The second thing that happens when you have that kind of success is that people start hoping for you to stumble. They start trying to make you stumble. Everyone loves a winner right up until they start winning too much.

It’s a tale as old as the written word: people like to build you up, and then they like to take you down. I don’t know why it’s like this, but it is.

Not just the fundamentals of the game, but the fundamentals of life. How to show up, how to push yourself, how to become something better than what anyone could have imagined. How to become what God has laid out for you.

That morning in that classroom, being asked to, essentially, show my papers activated only one impulse in me: competition. If someone doubted me, then I would prove them wrong. That day, that teacher doubted me in a most fundamental way. She doubted my right to even be in the room. So that teacher and that idea—the idea that I don’t even have a right to be in that room—is what I would spend the rest of my life proving wrong. And in small ways and in big ways, whether I wanted it to or not, race would be a silent but powerful guiding force that exerted its pressure on every step for the rest of my journey.

That was when I started to see that just because a coach is nice to you doesn’t mean you can trust them to have your best interests at heart. At the end of the day, they’re only looking out for themselves. I never confronted him about that, but it taught me a new level of the game.

question is not something I would learn until much later in life. I would learn that the higher up you go in this game, the more replaceable you become. I would learn that being the best was not a guarantee of a career, that a career was made of myriad things, of small, boring things. Of good agents and early morning workouts. Of medical procedures

A career is made of these things. It is made of broken fingers and trade rumors and coaches you can’t quite trust, and the occasional referee who reminds you a little too much of the police officers that stalked your neighborhood when you were a kid, glowering at you and your friends as though you were dangerous animals escaped from captivity rather than children—a look that gives you a cold chill, a fight-or-flight response that will lie dormant and coiled and always ready to spring at the base of your spine for the rest of your life.

The angrier I got, the more focused I became. What started out as a game between two brothers would suddenly feel to me like a life-or-death struggle for my whole existence. I tried to pride myself on being calm and even-keeled when I was growing up. I wasn’t trying to be one of those out-of-control types. I saw what out-of-control anger did to people and I wanted no part of it.

It was another point of proof that if you threw me into a situation, I knew enough about the game now to handle it. Maybe that was when I really started trusting myself. The very next day I went to a track meet and jumped six feet, six inches in the high jump. The previous year my highest mark was six feet, one inch. I don’t know what had changed. It seemed like nothing. But it seemed like everything.

I considered it my job and responsibility to work as hard as I needed to work to satisfy the demands of being competitive in NCAA basketball. And I took that responsibility seriously. In my mind, however, it was not connected to fame and riches and success. I just wanted to be a really good college player, and to know that no one in any program anywhere would outwork, out-prepare, or out-execute me.

There are good players and great players, but the technical distance between the best player in the NBA and the worst player in the NBA is really not that big. Everyone can shoot, everyone can dribble, everyone can pass, and everyone is strong. So confidence is really the thing that makes the difference between winning and losing. When I look back at my career, I can see now that each milestone I hit wasn’t so much a milestone of technical ability, though there were those. They were really milestones of personal belief. Which means that they were moments when I had to believe in myself despite the fact that someone else was committed to making sure I didn’t.

The air was mild, and you could smell the sea salt in the Atlantic breeze, the sound of the waves gently floating on the summer air. I took a moment to take it all in. It was a moment. Here were five wealthy black men, living in circumstances light-years beyond the wildest dreams of our parents, of our ancestors.