Michael Krzyzewski at 2011 PhRMA Annual Meeting

 

Michael Krzyzewski 
delivered these remarks
at the 2011 PhRMA Annual Meeting
April 14, 2011

Thank you.  And please eat.  The desserts are up there.  And I'm not a great‑grandfather.  I am a great grandfather.  All right?  I look old, and I am old, but I'm not there yet.

Really, it's an honor to be here.  I flew up this morning from Durham.  I have to go back right after this.  I'm actually going to teach a class at Fuqua at 5:00 this afternoon.  That's our business school.

And I have such good friends here.  You guys ‑‑ they're good friends, but both these guys (Bob Ingram and Chris Viehbacher) try to text me during games.  And that's one of the reasons I don't text very much.

And Bob sits close enough to our bench where every once in a while it's not me cursing at the official.  That's a different side of Bob, when those guys come out.

But to have all of y'all ‑‑ I say y'all now, Governor Hunt.  You won me over, man.  I'm a Polack from Chicago.  I used to say "youse guys" all the time.  Now I say y'all.

You know, when I go back to Chicago, before I get off the plane ‑‑ I grew up in the inner city of Chicago, and then went to West Point to go to school.  And I close my eyes, and I say "youse guys, youse guys, duh, duh."  You know?

Because if my buddies hear me say y'all, there's no Polish sausage or anything like that.  And if you don't get that, then you can't belch.  And when Polish people belch, that's their way of saying "We love you."

But I love what y'all are doing, or what youse guys are doing.  What a phenomenal thing to get all the stakeholders involved in trying to provide better health and longer, healthier, more productive lives for mankind.

You know, what a cool thing.  That's the best thing.  I'm a basketball coach.  What the hell am I doing here?

But I think it's incredibly interesting that you have so many members of a team.  And I would hope that in these two days you recognize the fact that you are a team, and what it takes to be a team.

I know you're constantly trying to adapt to change.  Change sometimes is difficult to adapt to, and a lot of people don't like to have change.

I have three daughters, seven grandkids.  And my oldest daughter, before she got married ‑‑ Debbie ‑‑ one night we're sitting on a sofa, watching TV.  And as we're watching TV, she comes close to me and she hugs me.  And she says "Daddy, I think I'm in love."

So I hugged her, and I said "Honey, I love you too."  It's a true story.  And she pushes me away and says "Dad!"  And you know, for fathers with daughters, when you go from "daddy" to "Dad", it's not a good drop.  You drop pretty far.

She says "Dad, I'm in love with Peter Savarino."  I said "Savarino?  Savarino?  Couldn't you have found a good Polish boy?"  And so she comes over and she gives me another hug, and she says "Daddy, you're the only good Polish boy."

It's true.  And that's exactly what I did.  I said "Aww."  I said "All right, marry the damn Italian."  So a few years later, my first two grandsons are Joseph Battista Savarino and Michael Giovanni Savarino.  Where's Wally and Stosch?  In her father's dreams, I think.

So basically, things that you thought about and what's happening now are different.  And what you're thinking about right now, a few years from now are going to be a little bit different.  Maybe a lot different.

And so while you are together, you need to get a current grasp of where all of us are.  But also try to have a picture of where you're going.  But even more importantly, are you going there together, or are you going there as separate stakeholders?

Are you going there as the CEO of your company, or the head of an organization doing patient rights?  The stakeholders, where you're looking for physicians.  In other words, are you doing it about me, or are you doing it about we?

And you know, you've had great speakers.  You're going to be in panels and all this stuff.  And you're going to hear, and you're going to see a lot of really neat things.

But you should try to hear and see those things as we, not just as me.  Because if you only hear it as me, then we're not going to be able to move forward or adapt as well as this thing keeps going, this timeline, this life.

You know, the people that we're trying to help, they keep living and growing.  And we have to grow together.  But I would like to encourage you to include with seeing and hearing, feeling.

Feeling.  I'm not sure you can ever really fight for something or do your best if you only get information, you analyze it, you talk about it, but you don't feel it.

You know, when I had the honor of being named our U.S. national coach in 2005, and then to have had the opportunity to coach the Olympic team in the world championships this last summer ‑‑ and I'll coach the team in London in 2012 ‑‑ I really felt that it was important to get those guys, who have pretty big egos ‑‑ and some of you have pretty big egos.  That's good. You've got to do pretty big jobs.

And they thought about me.  Not always we.  And so I thought the very first thing I needed to do with them is to get them a feeling for who they were representing.

And you can say "Well, this is PhRMA, and I'm with this organization.  I have this company," and all that.  But do you feel it?  Around our country, around the world right now, there's somebody ‑‑ somebody?  There are thousands of people who are doing this today.

They're sitting in a doctor's office and they've been told something that isn't very good.  And they're thinking to themselves, and they have their hands ‑‑ they're sitting, and they have their hands here (on knees), or hands here (holding face), and they're saying the expression "I can't believe this is happening to me."

Try to picture yourself ‑‑ you know people like that.  Probably some of you have ‑‑ all of you have been in that situation in some way.  But I'm talking about health care.  I'm talking about health right now.

And so picture yourself helping those people in what you're doing.  In other words, they're not chairs.  They're not tables.  They're people who are saying "I can't believe this is happening to me."

In what you do in taking care of inventing, researching, getting new products to help people who are in this situation, your moment of triumph is not when you sell something.

Because if you're only selling something, then shame on you.  Shame on you.  Your moment of triumph is when that person gets cured or gets relief.  And then, all of a sudden, when that person feels better or is told "You're cancer‑free, you've beaten this, you're on your way to do this, this looks great," we've won.

The same expression, "I can't believe this is happening to me," turns to be "I can't believe this is happening to me!"  Same words, but you don't get from there to here just by seeing and listening.  You get there by feeling.

When I took over the team we did two really neat things.  It was just before the Olympics.  We had a two‑day session in Las Vegas.  They like to come to Las Vegas, all right?  The actually do practice better there.  In everything, they practice better there.

So we're in Las Vegas, and we're having one practice.  And then I'm going to bring them to New York to have a media blitz.  We're going to take a week off, and then come back and start training for the Olympics.

In my very first practice I told my staff I wanted to do something where they get a feel for what we're doing.  So we come out for practice, and they're stretching, or whatever.

And I have a big TV, almost as big as that screen, right on the court.  And a lot of times we'll show things X and O‑wise, like this is what we're going to do, and then we go practice it.

And I said "Come over here, you guys.  I want to show you something."  And I said "All of you guys, like Carmelo, you went to Syracuse.  And Kobe ‑‑ oh, yeah, you should have gone to Duke.  So this doesn't pertain to you."

And I went through a couple, and I said "Do all your schools have fight songs?"  And they said "Yeah, yeah.  We got fight songs."  And I said "I'm going to show you ‑‑ America doesn't have a fight song.  What's America's fight song?"

"I don't know."

"What's our fight song?"

"I don't know."

So I said "This is going to be our fight song."  And I always like to, when I'm doing something about feeling, to give them a thing that they can look forward to where they're going to feel it again.

And I said "Our fight song will be played before every one of our games in Beijing.  And it'll be played twice on the last day.  It'll be played before the game, and it'll be played after the game, when they put gold medals around your necks and our flag is raised above all the others."

And then I put it on, and it was our national anthem done by Marvin Gaye in the early 1980s at an NBA game, like a legendary version of it.  And so that became our fight song.

If you would ask any of those guys, Dwyane Wade or LeBron, or any of them, what was our fight song, they said "The national anthem."  The national anthem.

Then, the next day, we flew to New York and we got on a ferry.  And we were going to take our team pictures.  We had suits on.  We also were in uniform.

And we went ‑‑ they just put the shades down, but you can see our Statue of Liberty out here.  We had our picture taken where the Statue of Liberty was right in the background, so they could feel ‑‑ actually, when we were doing the pictures, Carmelo Anthony said "Damn, Coach.  This is big."

In other words, throughout this thing you know it's big, but when you feel it's big, then you're going to do more.  And so after the picture, just before the picture was taken,  I said "Do you guys know what that is?"

They said "Yeah, it's the Statue of Liberty, Polack."  Just like "Come on, man."  Kobe said "I didn't go to Duke, but I got it, Coach.  Don't go into that much detail."

And I said "Okay.  Just to put it in perspective, 100 years ago" ‑‑ and this was true ‑‑ "100 years ago, my grandfather, Joseph Pituk, was on Ellis Island."  We have the paperwork and everything.

And I said "Imagine my grandfather" ‑‑ now, this was not true, but you have to embellish some stories, all right?  The other stuff was true.  This wasn't true.

I said "Imagine my grandfather, Joe, Joseph.  He's got two suitcases.  He just came from Poland.  And on his right is Wally, and on his left is Stosch."  See, we found those guys.  "And my grandfather says 'Wally, Stosch.'  'Yeah, Joe, what's up?'  He says 'A hundred years from now, my grandson Mike is going to coach the United States Olympic basketball team.  I got chills thinking of it right now.'"

And I turned to all of them, and I said "Carmelo, what about your mother" I knew things about each one of the guys.  And I asked "What about your grandfather?  What about" ‑‑ I said "On the last day, when we're playing for the gold medal, when the national anthem is being played, when you put your hand over your heart, I want you to think of the person you're thinking about today.

"Because it needs to be personal.  It needs to be personal.  It's not just about playing for your country.  I know that seems unbelievable, but if you're playing for Joseph Pituk, or whoever it was that came to your country or helped you, you're going to do even more.  You're going to do even more."

And so as far as getting feeling, throughout these two days spend some time talking about patients, talking about things that you did a year ago that translated into something that was "I can't believe this is happening to me!"  So that you understand what the seeing and hearing can do, if you feel it.

And then, try to work as a team.  Like with our team, you know, we have big egos.  Just like all of you.  You have big egos.  You have big responsibilities.

So how do we get an Olympic basketball team to play as one?  Well, we did it by developing standards, not rules, of how we were going to do it.  When we came back for practice, the night before we started practice I had a team meeting.  And it wasn't going to talk about basketball.

 I had before this ‑‑ excuse me. That means I love you, by the way.  Just so you know it, it's not like being rude.  Well, it may be. 

But during the day, I had individual meetings with four key people that I thought would help make our team, and they would understand feeling and leadership.

 I had an individual meeting with Jason Kidd, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James.  And with each one of them, I said "Tonight, we're going to have a meeting.  We're going to talk about how we're going to live for the next couple of months, about how we're going to live together," which I think is important for you all to do.

How you're going to live together, all of you.  Not just the Board, all of you.  Because if you live together, and you feel one another, more good stuff can happen.  You have to be like a family in doing this.

And I said "I'm going to talk about standards, and I'm going to say a few of the things that I would like to have."  And I said "The very first thing is I'm going to tell the team, when we talk to each other, we look each other in the eye.  There are no headsets, you're not texting, you're not ‑‑ eye to eye contact.  Eye to eye contact.  Every time we talk, okay?

"The second thing I'm going to say is we always tell each other the truth, at a moment's notice.  There are no half‑truths."  And I learned from being a cadet at West Point, we had an honor code.  You don't lie, cheat or steal.

In fact, the first captain of my first basketball team when I went back to coach, Tommy Valerio ‑‑ still can't play defense.  Another Italian guy.  Couldn't have a Polish captain my first time.  You Italian guys have been in my life forever.

But what I told them is "Look at each other.  Tell each other the truth.  And if we do that, we can trust one another."  Imagine if you left tomorrow from these meetings just doing that, where you look each other in the eye, tell each other the truth, and you went away from these meetings not "I wonder what he meant?  I wonder what she meant?  She doesn't really ‑‑ she isn't really going to do that."

You know, that's the way a lot of people leave meetings, instead of leaving "You know, I trust her.  I trust him."  Trust is the biggest force multiplier any company, family or team can have.

Because if you can do things on a moment's notice together, whoever you're supposed to beat, you've got a better chance of beating them.  Whether it be a physical opponent, whether it be a disease.

And if you're going to beat these diseases, you've got to beat it with a united front.  So I talked to these four guys individually, and finally we go to the meeting that night.

And I start off, eye to eye contact, trust, telling the truth.  And I said "What about you guys?  I don't want rules because they're my rules, and then I'm enforcing my rules.  If we have standards, they're ours.  We'll embrace them, we'll fight for them, and we'll do them."

So all these four guys said they were going to say something, so Jason Kidd raises his hand and he says "Coach, I think we should be on time.  We should respect one another and be on time."

I said "Everybody cool with that?"

"Yeah, everyone's good."

I said "Okay, let's take that respect thing a little bit further.  Let's really respect our opponent.  And respect our opponent enough where we will never have a bad practice.  Can we assure ourselves right now of everyone here that when you go out on the practice court, it will never be a bad one?  Are we good with that?"

"We're good with it."

"And we're going to pay attention to the scouting reports?"

"We're good with it."

And Nate McMillan says something, Mike D'Antoni says something, who are on our staff.  And all of a sudden, Dwyane Wade raises his hand.  And Dwayne said "Coach, when one guy takes a step forward, we all take a step forward together.  If I'm going to do something and one of you guys aren't there with me, we've got a problem.  Anybody who does something, we're all doing it together.  Are we good with that?"

"Yeah."

And he says "And by the way, for any of you guys, we're playing for the three letters on the front of our jersey, U.S.A." ‑‑ their names are always on the back ‑‑ "not for the name on the back."

That's a good thing for you all.  It's not your organization right now.  It's PhRMA, but you might as well put mankind there across your chests.

Two things, for the two things that those guys said.  We never had a guy late.  We never had a bad practice. And the guys told Nike, who made our uniforms, that the only letters they wanted being bold on the uniform were U.S.A.

If you take a look at an Olympic jersey, their name in the back is subdued and it goes into the uniform.  Again, I get chills thinking about it, because it's such a cool thing.

You wouldn't think, like, Dwyane Wade's not going to do that.  Jason Kidd's not going to think" ‑‑ yeah, they do.  Just like you might not think that someone in this room's not going to do it, but if you set the atmosphere, the environment, right to have something like that happen, it will happen.

You all are here together to do something really good.  Then use everyone together to do something that's really good.  And now, all of a sudden, there's another hand up.  It's Kobe Bryant.

And Kobe says "Coach, if we play defense and rebound, we'll kick everyone's butt."

And I like that.  Now, he's the leading scorer in the NBA.  So for him to say something about defense and rebounding, the guys are looking "Yeah, right.  He's not going to do that."

I'll take you a day and a half before that.  Kobe comes in a day and a half early.  We're having coaches meetings.  He walks into our coaches meeting, and ‑‑ I recruited him for Duke.  He was going to come to Duke if he didn't go home and go to the Hornets.  That's why I was goofing around ‑‑ actually, I wasn't goofing around about it.

But Kobe comes in, gives me a hug.  And he says "Coach, can I talk to you for a second?"  So I go out of the room, and I'm talking to him.  And he says "Coach, can you do me a favor?"

And I was goofing around, I said "Yeah, I can do you a bunch of favors.  What do you want?"

He says "No, it's serious business.  I want to guard the best player on the perimeter of every team that we play."

Now, that's the leading ‑‑ he had eight 50 point games that year.  And then he leans forward, and he said "And Coach, I promise you, I'll destroy them."

So I got a contract out right away, and ‑‑

(Laughter.)

So now, a day and a half later, he says defense and rebounding.  The next day at practice, in our practice, he did not take one shot, except when there was a shooting drill. And we were going five on five in that.

He didn't take one shot, because he knew everybody on his team was going to look to see if he was going to back up defense and rebounding.

After the practice, I called him over and I said "Kobe."

He says "Yeah, Coach?"

I said "You know that destroy thing?"

He says "Coach, I'll destroy them.  I'll kill them."

I said "I saw you score 50 points eight times this year.  Will you destroy offensively, too?"

He said "You know what I was doing, Coach."

I said "I know what you were doing.  You don't have to do it anymore.  Let's just balance this thing.  Let's make sure this thing is balanced."

And so a few more guys say things, and we have like 14 standards.  And LeBron hasn't spoken yet.  And I guess from this past summer, you can tell it takes a long time for him to make a decision.

So I'm getting ready.  I'm doing a little soft-shoe, getting ready to end the meeting, saying, you know, is he going to punk me today, like ‑‑ you know, you kind of learn about what's going on.

And all of a sudden, his hand goes up.  And he says "Coach?"

And I say "Yeah, LeBron?"

 And he goes through an unbelievable thing.  And what he says, basically, is there are no excuses.  There are no excuses for us.  And we always showed the gold medal that we were going for, what our goal was.

He says "There's no excuse for us not to get that thing," and he went through it.  And all of a sudden, that became our first standard.  No excuses.  Our last standard, 15, was pride.  Pride to be a part of something bigger than you.  And remember, we represent the best country with the best basketball.

And we had 15 standards.  There can be trust, I'm not going to go through all of them.  Actually, they're in the book.  If you don't read anything, look at the standards.

But they were our blueprint.  Now, one thing about having standards is you can have them, and a standard is the way you do things all the time.  You have personal standards.

But when a team has a standard, you make each other do them all the time.  That's what having standards ‑‑ in other words, if PhRMA has standards, then you make each other do them, all the time.  That's expected.

Any one in this room should make the other person be hungry and aggressive, and make sure that we're looking for improvements in health care.  Okay?

We go to China and we play an exhibition tour in a couple of cities.  We finally get to Beijing ‑‑ the day before we go to Beijing, we played Russia in an exhibition game, and we were awful.  We were just awful, and our standards were taking a dip.

And I was angry.  We as a staff stayed up all night, talking about changes.  I had an individual meeting with Kobe before we got on the plane.  I thought he was horrible, and I watched tape with him.  I said ‑‑ you know, I'm not sure anyone's ever done that ‑‑ "What do you think, man?  Not very good."

He says "No."  And he says "I got it.  I'll be good."  Well, we did something that day that won the Olympics.  It wasn't on the court, it was in a meeting room.  Not this size, but there were 18 people in that meeting room.

And we had a Come to Jesus meeting about standards.  And during that meeting, we held each other accountable, face to face, in why you weren't doing it.

And I'm going to show you a short video which is mostly the video that we showed them in that meeting.  It's not been shown to anybody.  It's not on NBA TV, and all that kind of stuff.

And it will start off with ‑‑ we actually ‑‑ now I've changed some things on it.  But when I showed it there, I had their voices from when they were giving the standards to actually say "This is what you said, and now you're not going to do it?"

And so I would like to share it.  And it starts off with what LeBron said.  I know it's basketball, but it's team.  And if you can put yourselves in that room, standards, and try to equate it to what we're doing here in these two days.

(video was played.)

So obviously, they did that (won the gold).  And you know, that person who "I can't believe this is happening to me", who's saying that today, is looking for a hero.

That person who's doing this is looking for a team that will fight for him or for her.  That person here needs help.  You are the help.  You are the people who have the resources, the knowledge, and hopefully you have the feeling, that will produce results which will take them here.

That's what you're doing here for these two days.  Do it as a team.  I'm wearing my Olympic gold medal ring today as a reminder to me of the brotherhood and sisterhood that you have when you develop a team like this.

Please.  Hear, see, and feel.  And you know what?  Some great things are going to happen.  Thank you very much.  Appreciate it.

 (Applause.)

MR. INGRAM:  Coach, we're running a little short on time.  But I thought maybe it would be appropriate to have one guy ask one question.  Who better to ask ‑‑

MR. KRZYZEWSKI:  Can I pick the guy?

MR. INGRAM:  He's got a microphone in his hand.  And Coach referred to Tom earlier.  Tom Valerio was Mike's first point guard on his first team, and was his point guard for win number one.  And he now works for AstraZeneca.  Tom?

MR. VALERIO:  Just for the record, I think Coach and I have a different recollection of my defensive abilities.

MR. KRZYZEWSKI:  I have tape, though.

(Laughter.)

MR. KRZYZEWSKI:  Coaches always have tape.

MR. VALERIO:  Coach, you talked about going from me to we, and the importance of standards.  Can you just give a little insight, though ‑‑ it doesn't seem like a natural thing for that caliber of player to start holding each other accountable, and stepping forward and doing that with their peers that play that well in the NBA.

MR. KRZYZEWSKI:  You know, it's a real interesting thing.  And you wouldn't think that, just like somebody would think that the CEO of one organization would not do that with someone else.

And I think ‑‑ I don't believe that.  You just have to set the environment for it to happen.  The summer before, 2007, I went to Akron to meet with LeBron, because I knew he'd be one of my leaders.

And I sat down with him, and we were adding Jason Kidd, Kobe Bryant, Tayshaun Prince, Carlos Boozer.  We needed more experience than we'd had the year before.  We needed to have a balance.

 And I asked LeBron, I said "What do you think about all this?"  And he says "I love Jay Kidd.  He's the best passer in the world.  I'm anxious to learn from him."

And he said "And Kobe's" ‑‑ LeBron may not say this now, but he did a few years ago ‑‑ he said "Kobe's the best player.  I want to see how he prepares."

And so Jason Kidd and LeBron were always together, and I knew that the dynamic of LeBron and Kobe had to be together if we were going to be a team.  And by that conversation, I already knew that LeBron wanted it.

And so basically all those guys, they learned from each other.  They brought out the best.  That's what I mean.  When you get everyone together, as good as you think you are as an individual company, you will never be as good unless you share some ideas.  You won't be.  Because somebody sees things a little bit better, or a little bit differently.

And that's what PhRMA is supposed to be about, is to get the collection of all these talents together and then share, and then ‑‑ you're competitive in the marketplace, and you should be.

But you're not competitive as to the fact of "we only want to take care of this many people," or ‑‑ there's not enough of you to take care of all the people.  Together, you hope you're taking care of most of the people.  Hopefully someday we'll take care of all the people.

But every guy who played on that Olympic team felt it was the most unselfish environment, and they learned the most.  And this past year, in Turkey, I had younger guys.  But I had two older guys, Chauncey Billups and Lamar Odom, who were my captains.  But then I had Derrick Rose, and Westbrook, and Durant, and these guys.

And they were terrific, and they learned.  They learned different things.  We were in Madrid for an exhibition game.  We were playing Spain, who was kind of the favorite to win.  And we were having this meeting.

It was another pretty tough meeting.  And I knew Durant was going to be my best player, but he wasn't asserting himself yet.  And he's a great, great kid.  The best.  A little bit quiet.  And during the meeting, he had his head down.

And we had already talked about standards and all that, so during the meeting, in front of everybody, I said "Yo, Kevin.  Pick your head up.  Look, any of you guys, we're having a meeting, you look at whoever's talking to you.  Whether it's me, an assistant, or another player, you got to ‑‑ I mean, that's the way we're going to do this."

And so after the meeting, Kevin came up, and he says "Coach, I apologize."  And I said "Look, you're supposed to be the face of what we're going to do.  How can we see your face, your strong face, if you're looking down?  You can't be shy."

You can't be shy.  And so some of you who aren't as big a company as someone else, don't be shy.  You might have the best idea.  Don't be shy.

And so after we played Spain, we beat Spain.  And it was so unbelievable, the basketball gods were so good.  First of all, that we one.  But secondly, there was one sequence ‑‑ when I watch tape, I watch expressions.  Like in that tape, there's defense, and you can see strong expressions all the time.

And that was one of our standards: never show weakness.  Never complain to a ref.  If you get hit, never show like you got hit.

And there's one sequence where Kevin Durant is just coming down the court, and he looks angelic.  He looks ‑‑ wow.  And the next day, when we're watching tape, all of a sudden we're watching tape, and we stop right there.

And I said "Look at this.  Kevin, you look unbelievable.  Russell, when he looks like that, what does it make you feel like?"

He said "Coach, it makes me feel like we're going to win."

And I said "So Kevin, before you ever shoot or play defense, if you look that way you create an environment where we can win.  Holy mackerel, if you ever have a bad expression on your face, you're an idiot and I'm an idiot for letting you do it."

He then became our best player.  In the last three games, he scored more points than anybody in the history of U.S. basketball.  He averaged over 30 points a game.  Unbelievable.

And so strong faces like that ‑‑ Lamar Odom, who is third fiddle or whatever on the Lakers, he's a beautiful guy.  After we play in the preliminary rounds, we're going to the medal round which is one and done.

We have about two and a half days of practice.  So I tell him at night one time, at a team meeting, I said "Lamar, I need three minutes with you at some time in the next ‑‑ and it will change your life.  Can you give me" ‑‑ and he's with his wife, the Kardashian, who was great.  She was great.  She kicked his butt all the time.  It was great.

So the next day we're at practice, and he comes up to me and I say "No, I don't have time yet."  And we're at a team lunch, and he says "I'm ready," and I said "Not yet."

And I put him off about five or six times, until the last practice before the medal round, we're through with practice, guys are shooting around.

I said "You got three minutes?"  He says "Yeah, yeah.  Yes, finally.  I do have three minutes."

 So we go over, and I said "I've loved the way you play.  On the Lakers, they're lucky to have you, because whenever they take the picture of the team, you're always on the side.  And Kobe, and Pau Gasol, and Bynum, they're in the middle.  But you're one of those guys."

And I said for the next week, in these games, I needed somebody to bridge the gap between Durant and the rest of the team.  I said "You've got to be that guy."  And I said "It's time for you ‑‑ when you go back to the Lakers, you can do whatever you want.  But for right now, you need to be center stage."

I mean, he averaged about 20 points a game during the medal round.  And when we got the gold medals, again, the flags going off, and then finally they're giving the trophy to him and Chauncey Billups, and our whole team is on the stand with our gold medals, and he's put this ‑‑ I mean, he's got a big smile.  Lamar's got an unbelievable smile.

I said "Lamar!  Hey, Lamar!"  And he turns around.  And I won't say the adjective I used, but I said "Hey, man.  Center stage.  Center stage."

And he broke up.  And those are the kinds of things ‑‑ do those things, man.  Just do those things.  You all are ‑‑ it's right there, but you got to feel it to do it.  Don't be so academic and so precise in everything that you do.  Put some damn emotion and feeling in it, and you'll get much better results in doing that.

And God bless you for what you're doing.  God bless you for what you're doing, and Godspeed.  Thank you very much.