John Amaechi: evaluation

Transcript context

…About life, not playing basketball, but you feel you learned anything from John Stockton and Karl Malone? Yes, huge amounts. Huge amounts, especially from Karl. He was a surprisingly funny, kind, driven, ambitious athlete. I didn’t know him off the floor, but around the game, that’s who he was. We were often punished for our performance if it was not optimal. And because John and Karl were older in the context of athletes, Jerry would punish us to run endless sprints. And these two guys say, “You guys just sit out,” and they would sit out. But Karl, I remember looking up during sprints once and seeing John Stockton reading USA Today as we were just slugging up and down the court, and I looked over and Karl had demanded that one of the trainers bring him a bike. And he wasn’t just kind of keeping warm, he was leathering it on the sidelines. And I just thought, “How remarkable, best player on the team, best player perhaps in the history of Utah basketball. And there he is at 30 odd years old,” which was old for a basketball player, “At 30-odd years old, leathering it on the side while we slog on the court.” Of NBA players as a whole, what percentage do you think truly love the game?…

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