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James Rosenquist
Pop Art Master
At that time, if a person could draw, realistically, you draw someone's likeness Well, fine art was far, far away. I mean it was a distant thing that remained in Europe somewhere, or the Far East. It had nothing to do with America. I mean, to me that was some very distant thing. And the only relation to art could be, say, magazine illustration, or working for television, or fashion illustration for a newspaper, or something like that. I met an artist in Minneapolis named Cameron Booth, who was always about ten years older than the year. So he was in the Great War -- World War I. He was gassed in World War I, stayed in Paris after the war, studied with a number of people in Paris and in Germany, and I met him. He could see that I knew how to draw -- I met him at the University of Minnesota -- and he said, "Why don't you get out of town quick? Go to New York, and study with Hans Hofmann." But Hans Hofmann wasn't available. So until that time, I got a job. I think I was 17 years old or 18. I got a job painting Phillips 66 emblems for a commercial painting company all through the Midwest. I traveled around in a truck and painted these emblems alone. I was all alone. All over, like a gypsy painter, all through the Midwest. I mean, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, all around that area.
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James Rosenquist
Pop Art Master
James Rosenquist: Criticism in the art world is much different than say, the theater world, where a big, mass effort lives or dies according to a theater critic. An artist is happy if they get their picture shown or their name in print. I mean, I've been called everything. I've been called "death warmed over" by John Canaday and everything else. I wrote him back a letter in The New York Times, saying I know more about death than he does. So he quit writing the art criticism, and started doing cooking! But when a young artist starts, and everyone says he or she is a genius, and they are put in all sorts of shows, and then they decline, things decline, and they are taken out of a show, or they are not put in, that can be rough on some people, to get your first hard criticism. If you withstand that, and just continue to work, you become resilient, and then you sort of get hardened to criticism, and it really doesn't mean a thing. I mean, the criticisms I like is if they have got a handle on what I'm trying to do, whether I'm successful or not. If they have an inclination about this is the direction that I'm going in, instead of being totally confused, and they say, "It's terrible! It's horrible!" and they haven't got a clue, and it's all confused as to the momentum of what it is. That I don't like. I mean, I like criticism though. It's other people's input, other people's idea. And I think it would be very hard to be an art critic, or any kind of a critic, because it would be hard to be in people's minds. I was on a panel discussion with Marshall McLuhan, back in 1966 or '67. Phillip Morris put us there. And someone in the audience says, "Mr. McLuhan, I read all your books, and I happen to disagree with naw-naw-naw-naw something." And he says, "Oh, you've read all my books? Then you only know half the story." So it's hard to figure out. Someone asked him, "Mr. McLuhan, can you tell me the metaphor between this and that?" And he says, "Metaphor. Metaphor. A man's grasp must exceed his reach, or what's a metaphor?"
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Pete Rozelle
Pro Football Hall of Fame
I can be patient, which I think is probably a very fortunate trait to have on a job as commissioner, where you have to get along with so many different constituencies: the owners, the press, the fans, the coaches. There are so many people involved in the strange nature that constitutes a sports league. I think that was very fortunate. I think that if you're high strung, and flare, you could have problems, and I was fortunate that I didn't. Also, I think that you have to spend a lot of time, and you have to think about things that lead to better the sport -- changes, innovations, progress -- and I always felt that very strongly. We were fortunate that some of the things we developed played a big part in the development of the league.
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Bill Russell
Cornerstone of the Boston Celtics' Dynasty
I'm the coach, okay, and so I'm talking to my guys before the fifth game. And I says, "We're going to beat these guys, and this is how we're going to do it." And we had a rookie on the team who's now a judge in Boston, because he had an ailment, he had to retire, but he told me a few years ago, he said, "You know, I was in the locker room when you said that. That's the most disciplined situation I've ever been in my life, because I had to discipline myself from falling out on the floor laughing, when you said we're going to beat these guys." He says, "They're going to kill us!" And he says, "We haven't got a chance!" And he sat there and watched the whole thing happen. And he says that's one of the wonders of his life, because I said it with complete confidence. And then I said, like I said earlier, "We don't have to win three games in a row. We've just got to win one." You see, after we won two of them, the pressure completely shifts. The pressure is on them. You're up three to one, and how do you lose three straight?
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Bill Russell
Cornerstone of the Boston Celtics' Dynasty
I had an agenda, and there was nothing that was going to get me away from that. And my agenda was to win every game, if possible. Nothing that anyone externally or internally could do to change that. And so, you're operating in a place where the only thing keeps you going is you know that you are right. Like my college coach -- who was incidentally a good man but we never got along. As a player and a coach it was oil and water. First game against Cal, their center had been pre-season All American, all that. The first five shots he took, I blocked. So they called time out. They had never seen anything like this, because there was nobody blocking shots before. When I started blocking shots I had never seen anybody block a shot. So they called time out. They go in their huddle. We go in our huddle. The first thing my coach says to me is, "You can't play defense that way." And I'm thinking, "Why would you say that?" He said, "This is the way I want you to play defense." And he showed me right there. He wanted me to half-man him, keep this at his back, and deny the passes to him. Well, I tried that. He had his little point guard, took one dribble to his right, dropped a bounce pass, he caught it, turned, I'm on his back, out of defense, he shoots the lay-up. He does that three times in a row, my coach never said anything. That was the way he wanted me to play. So I said -- mentally -- I said to myself, "No. Not going to happen." So I went back to playing the way I knew how to play. As a consequence, for three years we were in this big argument about that I was a lousy defensive player because the mantra -- if you want to call it that -- in those days was, "No good defensive player ever leaves his feet." I couldn't block shots without leaving my feet. So I was violating all the preconceived rules. When I think that it never occurred to them that this was an innovation -- I just give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they never expected an innovation to come out of the projects of West Oakland.
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