MIKE SINGLETARY'S FAVORITE PART OF THE GAME

"Do you know what my favorite

part of the game is?

The opportunity to play."

-Mike Singletary

WHAT ALL PLAYERS MUST UNDERSTAND

"It's not up to anyone else to

make me give my best."

-Hakeem Olajuwon

WHAT EVERY GREAT ATHLETE KNOWS

"There has never been a great athlete who died not knowing what pain is."

-Bill Bradley

WHAT MAKES A TEAM WORK

"Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work."

-Vince Lombardi

DEFEAT IS A STATE OF MIND

“Defeat is a state of mind. No one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as reality. To me, defeat in anything is merely temporary, and its punishment is but an urge for me to give greater effort to achieve my goal. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.”

-- Bruce Lee

THE MAN WHO WILL WIN

"The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win. The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before."

~Steve Young

(Thanks to Coach Creighton Burns for sharing this quote)

TOMORROW

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. It comes in to us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands, and hopes we've learned something from yesterday."

-John Wayne-

BE THE BEST EACH TIME OUT

Herb Adderley, the Packers’ All-Pro cornerback, recalls Vince Lombardi talking to him after a game against that Chicago Bears. “You just played the best game I’ve ever seen a cornerback play,” said Lombardi. “This game was on national television. I’m sure the people who saw the game feel the same way. Keep this in mind, that each time you go out on the field you say to yourself, ‘I want these people, when they leave here, to say to themselves that they saw the best cornerback they have ever seen.’”

From "What It Takes To Be #1" by Vince Lombardi, Jr.

THE ORIGIN OF PRESSURE

“Pressure comes when someone calls on you to perform a task for which you are unprepared.”

-Tony LaRussa

LOVE OF THE GAME

“People ask me what I do in winter when there is no baseball. I will tell you what I do, I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

-Rogers Hornsby (Hall of Famer)

DON'T CONFORM...BE DIFFERENT WITH ENTHUSIASM AND ATTITUDE

When the Cincinnati Reds signed Pete Rose in 1961, the organization made a regular habit of signing young Cincinnati-area players to fill its minor league rosters. Rose was signed not because he was an attractive prospect but because he was from the area. When he arrived at spring training in Tampa, Florida, he had one above-average tool—his speed—plus an abundance of enthusiasm and determination. His arm strength was barely average, his defensive skills were unimpressive, and he lacked power. But Rose was always among the first to work out in the morning and the last to stop at night. When his assigned team was not scheduled to be doing anything, he would mix with another team and find some way to get extra work. Rose had been assigned to Karl Kuehl’s Class D Geneva, New York, team for spring training, but one day Kuehl went over to the Triple A game. One game was not enough for Rose, so after his workouts ended he would dash over to the Triple A game and tell the veterans, “If you’ve had enough for today, I’d love to finish the game for you.” When a veteran chose to opt out, Rose would take over for the late innings. No other young player had the nerve to make such an outlandish request, and it paid off for Rose—he got noticed and kept moving through the system.

Rose thus ignored the tacit demands to conform, and he advanced by not being afraid to be different. He chose extra work and spending time with more advanced players over team bonding. This takes some degree of courage, since he did make himself stand out from the crowd with his work ethic and relentless hustle.

From "Mental Toughness: Baseball’s Winning Edge" by Karl Kuehl, John Kuehl, and Casey Tefertiller

DREAMS

"At first, dreams seem impossible, then improbable and eventually inevitable."

-Christopher Reeves

WHAT SERPARATES A WINNER FROM SECOND PLACE

“In the end, it’s extra effort that separates a winner from second place. Butwinning takes a lot more that that, too. It starts with complete command of thefundamentals. Then it takes desire, determination, discipline, and self-sacrifice.And finally, it takes a great deal of love, fairness and respect for your fellow man.Put all these together, and even if you don’t win, how can you lose?”

-Jesse Owens

GOING THE EXTRA MILE

Practice is finished, but Patrick Peterson isn’t.

He walks across the green turf of LSU’s indoor practice facility, into a corner of the massive building next to the north end zone where a row of blocking pads are attached to the wall.

Knees bent, he locks into ready position as though the pads are a real live opposing receiver and begins his work. He slides from one pad to the next, back and forth, his arms firing out like pistons, slapping them like they’ve hurled an insult his way.

Bap...bap...bap...bap...bap.

No one is around. No coach is in his ear imploring him to work harder. No one has to tell him anything.

The voice is in his head. The voice telling him that it isn’t just talent alone that will take him where he wants to go.

It’s sweat. It’s the extra mile. It’s every day.

Bap...bap...bap....bap...bap.

“It comes from my father,” Peterson said. “He always put in my head that you’ve got to be better than the next man. While I’m working, someone else is sleeping. I definitely took that to heart. That helped me be the player I am today, but there are definitely things I can sharpen up.

“I tell myself, I want to be the best cornerback to ever come out of not only LSU, but the whole NCAA. That was my goal coming into college. I believe I have achieved some of the goals I have set.”

Read Scott Rabalais' complete article at: http://bit.ly/gEha9f

WE'RE ALWAYS TRYING TO GET BETTER

''We got better yesterday. We got better on Wednesday. We're going to have a better team this Sunday. That really has been a trademark of this team ... to always make improvements over the course of the season. So I don't think we take weeks off. I don't think we take days off. We're always trying to get better.''

-Tom Brady