Top 35 Bob Cousy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sports create a bond between comtemporaries that lasts a lifetime. It also gives your life structure, discipline and a genuine, sincere, pure fulfillment that few other areas of endeavor provide.”

— Bob Cousy

2. “Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful at anything you put your mind to.”

— Bob Cousy

3. “Do your best when no one is looking.”

— Bob Cousy

4. “The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.”

— Bob Cousy

5. “But in fairness also to the idea of continuing success, you also have to exploit opportunities.”

— Bob Cousy

6. “We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan. It’s further east than Hell’s Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches and cockroaches were big enough to carry away small children.”

— Bob Cousy

7. “Bob Brannum was my body guard on the court. He was 6?-6 and built like a bulldog.”

— Bob Cousy

8. “I grew up in the heart of the Depression.”

— Bob Cousy

9. “We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.”

— Bob Cousy

10. “I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.”

— Bob Cousy

11. “We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the things that other kids did.”

— Bob Cousy

12. “It also didn’t take me long to decide that Tri-Cities wasn’t for me, and that I wasn’t going to go there to play basketball.”

— Bob Cousy

13. “These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren’t any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.”

— Bob Cousy

14. “Race wasn’t an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.”

— Bob Cousy

15. “I once heard that Paul Seymour said as much as winning an NBA Championship, he’d like to see the Celtics lose a game after Auerbach brought out the cigar so he could go up to Arnold and stuff the cigar in his face.”

— Bob Cousy

16. “French was my first language.”

— Bob Cousy

17. “I had endured six years of frustration so I think winning it all meant more to me than most of the others on the team.”

— Bob Cousy

18. “Every jock gets up and tells the world how lucky he is. But I feel that I may be the luckiest one of all in terms of timing and being at the right place at the right moment-even though, for the last 30 years, I was told I was born 20 years too soon, for obvious reasons.”

— Bob Cousy

19. “I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.”

— Bob Cousy

20. “We had a strong relationship with Walter Brown, and felt that he was the best owner in the league.”

— Bob Cousy

21. “Kerner decided to trade my rights to the Chicago Stags, which sounded better to me than Tri-Cities, but the Stags folded up almost immediately.”

— Bob Cousy

22. “Indiana gets credit for having the most rabid basketball fans in the union, but Maine is a very, very active basketball state.”

— Bob Cousy

23. “Russell joined the team in December, 1956, following the Olympics.”

— Bob Cousy

24. “The NBA wasn’t a big deal at that time, so it wasn’t really in my career plans.”

— Bob Cousy

25. “My family was poor, my father drove a cab for a living, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat.”

— Bob Cousy

26. “I won the city scoring championship as a senior.”

— Bob Cousy

27. “Back then every small town had a gym, and if itseated more than 2,000 then we’d be interested in playing in it.”

— Bob Cousy

28. “People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.”

— Bob Cousy

29. “You have to remember that coaching wasn’t sophisticated back then – you didn’t have the camps, clinics and all the technical advances that are available today – so from that standpoint, playing with a cast on my arm was a fortunate event in my life.”

— Bob Cousy

30. “There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.”

— Bob Cousy

31. “We played every night. Sometimes we’d stay overnight after a game, but we’d usually drive on to our next destination.”

— Bob Cousy

32. “We ran an up-tempo, transition-style of game at Boston College – very similar to what we ran when I played for Arnold.”

— Bob Cousy

33. “But as a coach I wanted to keep things from being too complicated.”

— Bob Cousy

34. “That seemed to be the case with most of the teams based in the smaller towns – the fans were more rabid, and they wanted to literally kill the opposition.”

— Bob Cousy

35. “My biggest win was getting the meal money bumped from $5 to $7.”

— Bob Cousy

36. “Cooper was my road roommate, and also happened to be the first African American player drafted by a National Basketball Association team.”

— Bob Cousy