Rod Laver Quotes

Sometimes when you get to the press conferences, you hear you're going to play this person in the semifinals, and in the quarters, you're going to play her. And I'm like, 'Hold on a second.' First of all, you have to make it there. Second, your opponent needs to make it there. It looks easier on paper than it is in real life.

I'm nervous when I play in the Masters or most other tournaments.

I think you can train yourself to block out some of that pressure and replace it with confidence. It's about preparation, and the more prepared I am, the less pressure I feel and the more confident I am. As your confidence grows, it's only natural that the pressure you feel diminishes.

In boxing, if you think you will lose... you're already halfway there.

The adrenaline is pumping before or during a game - you're excited, you're anxious. But the biggest things are just having fun and being confident. There really is no alternative because you just can't be negative. And a huge part of developing that confidence is by working hard every day, and I don't think that is limited to the baseball field. I think that bleeds over to all aspects of anything that you're doing or working on in life.

I get a bit nervous because I just want the show to go well. I think you always have to be a little bit nervous, or else you're a little checked-out, and that's maybe the time when you're not doing your best stuff, because you're kind of just checked-out and falling back on stuff.

If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.

Arousal-control has been an issue for me since the beginning of my career.

Every day I wake up and go to sleep, I'm thinking about beating Cub Swanson

It's about us getting ready to play. It's not about the other team. We'll beat ourselves before they beat us. That's always our approach.

I think it rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it is to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.

When something bad happens to me, I think I'm able to deal with it in a pretty good way. That makes me lucky. Some people fall apart at the first little thing that happens.

When I come into a tournament, I'm expecting to win. That's my philosophy. I can't go to a tournament thinking, 'I'm going to get my ass kicked today, so I might as well leave.'

I never missed a putt in my mind.

A lot of tournaments that I can remember I made a few bad shots and I was afraid I would lose the tournament and it seemed to work, the putts seemed to go in. Just the Desire.

When you go on a stage, before you go on a stage you're really scared and you're really frightened. You don't know what to do. "Why did I say yes to this?" But once you're on the stage you think, "Okay."

The real battle is won in the mind. It's won by guys who understand their areas of weakness, who sit and think about it, plotting and planning to improve. Attending to the detail. Work on their weaknesses and overcome them. Because they can.

Trying your best not to get stressed out, the hardest part is not to get down, not to let the business get to you. I think the business is more mental than it is talent. I think you can have the talent, but if you don't have it up here, I think you can easily just break down.

Whenever I'm onstage, I try my best not to think that I'm performing. It's simply another part of my day.

I don't care what anybody says. The first tournament is not the hardest one to win. It's always the second one.

Your body can dictate your mind, so when I walk to a fight a lot of times I'm scared, I'm scared to death, I have a lot of doubts of myself, I'm afraid to fail, I'm afraid to be humiliated in front of everybody; but what happens, I act like it's impossible for me to fail and that my victory is a certainty. So as I'm walking to the Octagon and I act with confidence my body takes over my mind and I become confident for real. As I'm walking I see the change in my mind and when I reach the Octagon I'm a different person, I'm very confident.

I don't think it's tough to get there mentally. Your mind is saying, 'You know how to do this.' But your body doesn't always respond.

This is sort of inflection-free acting [playing Maigret], and I really wasn't sure if I could do it - you make your mind up on whether I've succeeded or not. But yes, I found it difficult when we were shooting; it was a couple of weeks before I settled into not worrying - to finding a way of delivering those lines - so my worries of many months before I think had been justified. I found it a difficult way of being.

It is important that you don't let your opponent impose his style of play on you. A part of that begins mentally. At the chessboard if you start blinking every time he challenges you then in a certain sense you are withdrawing. That is very important to avoid.

I'm scared of the interviews...I'm scared of having to get up onstage again. I'm scared of the critique. I'm scared right now of doing this again. But that's why I have to do it, I think.