I danced in a company of 'West Side Story' when I was very young. It was most of the original cast - Larry Kert, Chita Rivera - and Jerry Robbins directed. It was tough, a wonderful initiation for me.
I make my practices real hard because if a player is a quitter, I want him to quit in practice, not in a game.
My personal coaching philosophy, my mentality, has always been to make things as difficult as possible for players in practice, however bad we can make them, I make them.
Any fighter, at the end of the day, that says it's not about the money is ridiculous. We wouldn't be training this hard, putting our bodies on the line, and torturing our bodies if there wasn't a payday at the end of the day.
In college, practice is draggin'. Coach goes, 'Oh, hey, go on over there and start a fight with one of the linebackers.' Okay. So I'll go and start a fight with one of the linebackers... It's just an attitude that really developed in me, and now we just amplify it times 100 and make sure everybody understands what I do and what I'm about.
Training is very tough. I probably hurt and get out of breath more in training because in matches, you can hit an ace, then have 25 seconds off. In training, you're doing drills constantly.
If you're not on your 'A' game in our workouts every day, you're going to get absolutely smoked.
Part of the attraction of the SEAL teams was the incredible tests that it offered.
My swim coach was very tough on me, and I respond well to that training... being pushed to my limit.
We are extending basic training. It'll be the longest and toughest in the world.
I did some really heavy, intensive clinics with Billy Robinson. Anyone that knows anything about Billy, he was a mean old dude! I survived training with him and Josh Barnett, right in the same vein, my head coach for, like, 12 years.
Boot camp sucks - SEAL training sucks - but you know what? That's what makes you good.
Practice is tough. We try to purposely make it difficult on our players on whatever it is that we're trying to do during the week to get ready for that opponent so that we see the most difficult looks, so that we make our players aware of the things that could certainly impact the game in a negative fashion.
There is a great advantage in training under unfavorable conditions. It is better to train under bad conditions, for the difference is then a tremendous relief in a race.
I grew up dancing, and my ballet teacher was literally a drill sergeant; she was so strict and so scary. And it made me a better dancer.
I came to my first Colts training camp in July of 1950, and it was murder, absolute murder. We had a coach named Clem Crow who must have been nuts. You got to remember that I'd been a Marine, had gone through basic training and spent 26 months in the Pacific during WWII, but the Marine drill instructors had nothing on Clem.
