“[Jim Graham] had been a linebacker at Penn State, and was seriously old-school. I mean, really old-school; like he thought the forward pass was a trick play.”

“Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn't he?" he said.I could barely muster a "yeah."That's a good thing," the assistant told me. When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, it means they've given up on you.”

“He'd also warn me that even if I was in a position of strength, whether at work or in relationships, I had to play fair. "Just because you're in the driver's seat," he'd say, "doesn't mean you have to run people over.”

“Never make a decesion until you have to". He'd also warn me that even if I was in a position of strenght, whether at work or in a relationship, I had to play fair. "Just because you're in the driver's seat, doesn't mean you have to run people over.”

“There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.”

“Temelji. To je bilo ono što nam je poklonio trener Graham. Temelji, temelji, temelji. Kao profesor uvidio sam da ovu lekciju mnogi preskaču, najčešće na vlastitu štetu. Uvijek se moraju postaviti temelji, jer onaj zanimljivi i zabavni dio bez njih neće funkcionirati.”

“In the fifty years my parents were married, in the thousands of conversations my dad had with me, it had just never come up. And so there I was, weeks after his death, getting another lesson from him about the meaning of sacrifice—and about the power of humility”