Don Nelson Quotes

It's no better feeling than coming into a game being the underdog, and everybody going around telling you you can't win, and people say we going to lose by this much and that much.

I love an underdog. No, I don't necessarily mean the cartoon. I mean like David, as in Goliath, or the Bears, as in The Bad News Bears.

I often get sent scripts about little men in big situations. There's a comic element to it, which is forces stacked against this little guy, and how is he going to defeat them?

When we went up against teams that were better, I just hoped that we could steal the victories.

We all assume that if you're weak and poor, you're never going to win. In fact, the real world is full of examples where the exact opposite happens, where the weak win and the strong screw up.

I've always been an underdog. I feel like I beat the odds.

I was the kid that was the 199th pick that never had the body for it. People didn't think I'd play one year in the NFL, and now I'm going on my 17th year.

I've faced the undefeated, young up-and-comers, everybody counting me out before, on a big card, with big lights, TV.

Nothing really comes easy to you when you're under-recruited, you're undersized, you're undervalued. It's a situation where you have to be better than the bigger guys.

The teams that you come across, they are not physically super-human, they are just very good. So it is asking what do we about that. How do we take on the challenge?

I've been the underdog my whole career.

What is important is that the team continues to win their games.

If you play bad, you can win the games, but you have to play good and get the three points.

As long as my team wins games, who cares what people say?

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Every team that I've gone to has had trouble winning games. I guess that's what I've been put on this earth to do, to fix it.

Hate it or love it, the underdogs come out on top.

In the regular season, they all only count for one win or one loss. But for a team or coaching staff, these are tests, and you want to see where you're at.

Obviously, people say offense wins games, defenses win championships. But I think, at the end of the day, if you score more points than the other team, you're going to win.

I was one of those guys who wasn't supposed to make it in this league.

When I played for Barcelona, I knew that some home games were going to be easier than some others, as the team had plenty of confidence. That confident mentality helped Barcelona players win games.

In key times I performed well against Rafael Nadal regardless of the surface. The fact is you need to hold on as long as possible. You need to be strong in key times. And when there's the slightest opportunity, you need to seize it because he's one of the best players when things get tough.

At Euro 2004 - my first as a player - Greece won the title. A team nobody thought could win it.

There's so much more involved with the game than just sitting there, looking at the numbers and saying, 'OK, these are my percentages, then I'm going to do it this way,' because that one time it doesn't work could cost your team a football game, and that's the thing a head coach has to live with, not the professor.

When you get out there on the mound, you've got what you've got, and you got to figure out a way to get outs.