The Rich Roll Podcast - Coach George Raveling Is The Mentor You Wish You Had: Breaking Civil Rights Barriers, Staying Young & How The Hall of Famer Came To Possess MLK’s Most Famous Speech

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

One of the most respected and revered figures in sport, George Raveling is basketball — and so much more than basketball. The current Director of International Basketball for Nike, he was the first African American basketball coach at Villanova, University of Maryland, Washington State and University of Iowa before closing out a storied career at USC. He is an inductee into several halls of fame, including the College Basketball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He is a civil rights activist, outspoken on a wide array of social issues at the intersection of race, education and athletics. A world-class educator, he is a moulder of boys into men, and men into better men. Bottom line? George Raveling is the mentor you wish you had. But you can just call him Coach. This week I sit down with a truly remarkable man. A 79-year old with the vibrancy and energy of a college student, I was immediately struck by George's insatiable thirst for learning. His passion for ideas. And his devotion to people, human potential & personal development. Coach has lived life. And he's got stories to prove it. Inspirational stories about breaking racial barriers during the era of segregation. Instructive accounts of owning your destiny. And of course there's the legendary saga of how a young George came to stand alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington as Dr. King delivered his historic I Have A Dream speech. There's so much more to this incredible story — and to George — but I'm not going to spoil it here. I'll let Coach tell it in his own words. This is a phenomenal conversation about breaking barriers. It's about self-governance, self-belief and self-responsibility. It’s about literacy, civil rights and humanity. And it's about the importance of being a positive difference maker in the world. An absolute gem of a human being, George is a national treasure. I loved every second of my time with him and something tells me you will too. So take a knee and huddle up, because Coach has a message for you. Peace + Plants, Rich

The hardest battle that a person has to fight in their lifetime is to live in a world where every single day someone's trying to make you be someone you don't want to be. I think I know who I want to be. I don't need someone to try to make me be who they want me to be or to live by their values. And I respect their values. I respect their way of life. And I hope that they would do the same for me.

That's George Ravling. And this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. What's going on? Greetings. My name is Rich Roll Podcast. and positive change makers all across the globe. And the idea behind these conversations is to curate a sort of multidisciplinary masterclass in personal and professional development, all designed to help you and me unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So thank you so much for tuning in today, for sharing the show with your friends on social media

around the water cooler, for reviewing the show, for subscribing to the show on iTunes, which is very helpful. Please do that if you haven't already. And of course, for always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. This week on the show, very happy happy very excited to be sitting down with one of the great legendary basketball coaches of all time george raffling affectionately known as just coach everybody just calls him coach george is many many things he is nike's director of international basketball

he was a former standout player for Villanova and would then go on to not only become a legendary coach, but also somebody who broke through a myriad of racial divides by becoming the first African-American assistant coach at Villanova, and then the first African-American assistant coach at University of Maryland, which also made him the first African-American coach in the entire ACC. And then he became the first African-American head coach at both Washington State and Iowa. And then in 1986, when he turned 50, he moved to Los Angeles to become head coach at USC. And that was a seven-year period of time in his life when he really became quite active and outspoken on social issues at the intersection of race, education, and athletics. George retired at 57, but to this day, he is

considered to be one of the most respected and revered figures in not just basketball, but all of sport. He's an inductee into several Hall of Fames, including the College Basketball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. And at 79 years old at this point, this guy is just full of life. He is an incredible mentor to many, many people with a very energized, youthful, and really insatiable passion for ideas and people and human potential and personal and professional development. A case in point, since I met George a few weeks ago, not a day has gone by where he has not sent me a few emails every single day with links to all kinds of interesting

articles that he happened to have come across online. There was one day where I think he sent me 10 articles in a single day. In any event, I was introduced to George by Ryan Holiday, a great guest on the podcast and a friend who could not say enough about how extraordinary George is. And Ryan is more than correct. George is, he's sort of like, he's like a national treasure. He's just a gem of a human being for a surfeit of reasons. A man full of life experiences and stories, incredible stories, not the least of which is how on August 28th, 1963, George came to be standing alongside Dr. Martin Luther King at the podium on the steps of

the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington as Dr. King delivered his historic I Have a Dream speech. Incredible, right? Now, there is much, much more to this extraordinary story, and I'm not going to spoil it because George tells it at length during our conversation, and it will blow your mind. In any event, you guys are in for a real treat. This is a conversation about breaking barriers. It's about self-direction and self-belief. It's about civil rights and humanity in sport. It's about the importance of mentorship, what makes a great coach, importance of mentorship, what makes a great coach, and the characteristics of the great athlete. I loved every second of this one, but I only had 75 minutes with George, and honestly, we barely scratched the surface on his life and wisdom.

So I guess I would like you to consider this just a first installment with Coach because I can easily foresee having him back on soon, perhaps even periodically, to not only fill in the gaps, the remaining gaps on his life, but perhaps even for some more pinpointed discussions on specific topics related to human potential and performance and mentorship and personal development. In any event, take a knee, huddle up, and let's hear from coach. Super happy to be here with you today, Coach Rapp, George. What do you like to be called? George? Everybody calls me Coach. All right, I'm going to call you Coach. Try to maybe hold that a little bit. It might be better in your lap. Yeah yeah there you go that's

good so we were introduced to each other by our mutual friend ryan holiday who i'm a big fan of i know you are as well absolutely i tell him i'm president of his fan club he uh he's got quite a fan club and uh he speaks very very highly of you uh he was insistent that we get together and any friend of ryan's is a friend of mine. So it's a pleasure and an honor to be able to spend a little time with you today. Well, I echo the same sentiments for you. It's an honor for me to be on your podcast. I appreciate that. And just to set the stage, we're sitting in this beautiful library that is wall-to-wall books, floor-to-ceiling. Have you read all of these books?

No, no. The answer is no, but I've read- People send you read all of these books uh i've no no the answer is no but i've read people send you a lot of books i uh well i buy a lot of books but people send them to me too but uh um i'm well fortified if if if the bookstores go out of business i'll have enough books in here to last me for the rest yeah i think you're I'm well-stocked. And I keep buying them. Well, you should, right? And I think reading is a big part of your story. We're going to get into the background and all of that. But I know that reading is very important to you,

and you have your reading with Rav, right? Is that what it's called? That goes way back? Yes, I started that back in the 70s. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit, the importance of reading to you and kind of your advocacy around that well i i think uh uh at the time we we had not become a technological society in the sense that we are today but i think early on i i realized a unique value of information i used to tell my players that perhaps the two most

important commodities in the world were information and money. If you've got money, you can buy information. If you've got information, you can get plenty of money. And little did I know that we'd evolve into a culture that we presently live in where it's so dominated by information and so much information is readily available to us that you can, if a person wanted to self-educate themselves, all they have to do is get a smartphone and use Google servers. About anything you can imagine, if you Google it, you'll get anywhere from 10 to 20 articles on it. And so I think that it's comforting for me to know that I can continue to educate myself at 79 and take myself from where I am to perhaps where I should be intellectually and from a knowledge-gathering standpoint. Yeah, I mean, I think technology is really shifting how we learn and how we educate

ourselves. It's democratizing it in a large way, and it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out over the next 10 or 20 years and the impact that that has on, you know, the value of the college experience and college education when you can kind of take those matters into your own hands, regardless of your socioeconomic situation. And that's a great point. It really renders the excuse that we have poor teachers or poor schools. It really marginalizes that rationale now because if you have poor books or poor teachers, teach yourself and all you have to have is a smartphone to be able to do it.

But to race back to to the reading with Raveling, I started in the 70s and I felt that that a lot of the young people that I came in contact with were not avid readers. And when I asked them why, they said that it's boring. And so I tried to be an active listener, and they didn't say they didn't like to read. They just said it was boring. So I started to think to myself, if I can present to them the right topics, maybe I can get them hooked on reading. So if a kid liked music, I'd give him books about music. If he liked sports, I'd give him books about sports. I tried to make his ascension from where he was to where he could be reading-wise easy

for him, and not to give him the most complex books. easy for them and not to give them the most complex books. And the other avenue that I discovered, particularly for younger people, is to read to them. Because there's always a childlike characteristic in all of us. Even at 79, I still enjoy hearing nice intriguing stories and so i think when you read to a child uh it it it it stimulates their mind it takes them on a mental journey it heightens their curiosity and so what i tried to do was to to give books to young people and not reward them for reading them i when they bring them back i'd give them a little test and and i'd reward them for reading them. When they'd bring them back, I'd give them a little test, and I'd reward them for reading. And over the years, I began to realize that I'd struck upon something from an

ethnic standpoint, and that is that back in the days of slavery, the plantation owners used to hide their money in the books and put the books up on the shells because they never worried about the slaves stealing the books or the money because they couldn't read. And so how I translated that was that as long as someone can control your mind, they can control your body. And so if we don't allow people to possess our minds, then they cannot possess our bodies. And so how do we achieve that? By filling our head with as much information, as much knowledge, as much material as we possibly can.

material as it possibly can. And along the way, either by intent or unintended consequence, is that it stimulates your critical analytical thinking. It's just a byproduct of it. At some point, if you read enough, it's going to cause you to think different, to act different, and to be different. But it requires a certain level of self-discipline and willingness. And it reminds me of a speech that you gave that I listened to the other day. I think it's from 1977. It was on your podcast, where the basic theme of it was, it's up to you. If it is to be, it's up to me. That was a talk that I did to kids at our basketball camp back in the 70s. And as

cliche as it sounds, I think it's a powerful statement. Research would substantiate it. And that is that at the end of the day, nobody's going to row our boat for us but ourselves we either our lives are going to be lived in a relatively orderly manner and so either our hands are going to be on the steering wheel of our life or someone else's hands are going to be on the steering wheel of our lives and i prefer that that they uh that i i govern my my life and and the way i. And I've been actually, you're probably the first one that I've talked to publicly about this, but I've been working on this theory that I'm going to continue to work on over the year until I get it really well defined, but I call it environmental control. And the theory behind this is if you can control the

environment in which you live, then you can create the necessary environment to live a peaceful, productive life, to be happy, if in fact happiness is something that's important to you and so it we the idea is to create a community within this this universal community and and and and i can control the community that i live and i can control the people i associate with the books i read, my values, what I watch on television, how I think. We have a lot more control over our lives than we realize that we do. I just don't think that our thinking is maybe as sophisticated as it could be or would be if we decided, if everyone decided once and for all that I'm going to be the captain of my ship, I'm going to control my destiny, I'm going to create a path to success for me. And if they

started to control the people that they choose to be around, what they listen to, what they watch, their values. I think it's very easy to do. And I didn't actually think about this a whole lot until the last four or five years, but I really have put that into play. I'm very watchful of what I eat, where I go, what I do. And I try to create an environment in which I feel that I can exist and feel like I'm making progress. I'm not a person that believes in happiness.

I think, to me, happiness is, if you spend your whole life chasing happiness, I think you're going to be chasing a goat because the bar's always going to be moving. And most times, happiness is validated by someone else. And so, to me, rather than go through all the anxiety of being happy, I never thought, this is the first time actually in a long time that I even talked about happiness

because I try to eradicate that word from my vocabulary. The idea of happiness as some sort of destination. Yes. But I would presume that purpose and engagement, you know, sort of supplants the idea of happiness in terms of being a contented and directed individual. I'd be more, great, you picked a perfect word as it relates to me. I'm more interested in being contented than I am being happy because it and then I realized that that these these are momentary existence but you're always reaching and and you get to a point uh that you live and manifest something I learned at Nike when I work in there and their mantra is there is no finish line

and that that that you're constantly uh yourself, what's next? I remember Phil Knight saying to me one time, the minute you think you've won, you're starting to lose. Yeah, nothing is static. Yes. And, you know, in between the lines, what I'm hearing you speak to is this idea of self-determinism, right? Yes.

The idea that you can control your environment, the adage that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and the extent to which we can control some of these factors. And that is an idea that I believe in wholeheartedly, but it also butts up against this kind of victim narrative that seems to populate the news

and our culture at the moment, the idea that everybody is a victim and there's a lot of finger pointing and blaming other people for the circumstances of our lives. And on some level, you're a rebuttal to that, I would say. Well, as it relates to me, and the minute you start to try to reach out into these other communities and connect with them, even if it's by way of conversation or just mentally, I think that you now run the risk that they're going to try to validate who you are, what you say, or what you do. And I think I'm perfectly capable of validating myself. I don't

have to live by someone else's norms or standards for validation. I used to say in a talk that I did that the hardest battle that a person has to fight in their lifetime is to live in a world where every single day someone's trying to make you be someone you don't want to be. I think I know who I want to be. I don't need someone to try to make me be who they want me to be or to live by their values. And I respect their values. I respect their way of life. And I hope that they would do the same for me. Well, let's track it back. You know, the superhero origin story, so to speak. You lived through some very interesting times, some pivotal times in our history.

And you've played a significant role, not just in sport, but in the culture at large through your involvement in the civil rights movement, et cetera. But, you know, where does it all begin? the civil rights movement, et cetera. But, you know, where does it all begin? I know it begins in Washington, D.C., and had sort of an interesting family situation when you were a kid. It actually, as I look quickly, you try to reflect on it, and you probably touched upon a real important item in my life, and that was Washington, D.C. I was born in Washington, D.C.

Then you fast forward to the March on Washington, which was in Washington, D.C. But I grew up in Washington, D.C. during the Depression when things were rationed. Sugar was rationed, flour and so forth. And so when I was nine years old, my dad died. And when I was 13, my mom had a nervous breakdown and she was institutionalized at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. for most of the rest of her life. a hospital in Washington, D.C. for most of the rest of her life. And so now what happens is, by and large, I'm an orphan. And so what do you do with George?

And so my grandmother was really the matriarch of our family. I always envisioned her like the Pope. She was infallible, whatever she said went. And so my grandma worked for this white family in Georgetown, and she had mentioned to them about the circumstances. And so the lady at the house said, well, I think her daughter's name was Rachel. She said, well, Rachel works for the Catholic Charities. She might be able to help you. And lo and behold, she did.

She was able to get me in a Catholic boarding school in upstate Pennsylvania in a place called Hoban Heights, Pennsylvania. Geographically, it falls between Scranton and Pittston, Pennsylvania, up in the northeast part of the state. And so I finished the rest of my education there. I finished up grade school, what we would call junior high, and then I went to high school. And growing up without a father and a mother and sort of being raised by your grandmother and bouncing around a little bit, I would imagine that's where the seeds of, you know, self-determinism probably, you know, were planted originally, right? This idea that you're going to have to be responsible for yourself and having to shoulder that mantle at a very young age.

Yeah, I didn't have the luxury that comes with a family and a mom and dad in the sense that I didn't have someone there that was scripting out my day every, well, I did, but it was, it was a lot different because it, when you're in a family, uh, there might only be four or five of you, but at the school where I was, there were over 200 young men there. And, and, and basically, uh, we were in a very disciplined environment. In order to sort of pay your way, you had to do chores at the school. So the time that I was there, I did everything from cleaning out chicken coops to picking eggs,

baling hay, working in the bakery, scrubbing the chapel floors on my hands and knees, working in the laundry. By the time that I graduated from there, I was fully trained to live the rest of my life and be able to take care of myself. Even to this day, I get up every morning and I iron my pants and my shirt before i go off to work and i'm 79 years old yeah you make your bed you bounce a nickel off it well you know i it was funny when uh when i was in the army and a lot of people get surprised when i tell them i was in the army but there was a manmentory draft when i was there and so in basic training i did my basic training in fort knox uh kentucky and so you had

to make your bed every morning and stand for inspection and i was absolutely i just assumed everybody knew how to make a bed and guys were paying guys were willing to pay me 50 cents to make your bed in the morning and that and so all those little fundamental lessons that I learned in school, they all came back to help me along the way. I mean, I even learned how to drive a tractor over the course of the time there. So what I did is I had a broad landscape of learning opportunities outside the classroom. It was one thing to be able to get tremendous formal education in the classroom, but when you can couple that with life lessons outside of the classroom, that's a unique opportunity to grow and learn and that's a theme that i think kind of

overarches your coaching career right the idea that these aren't just athletes it's not just about you know what happens you know at practice or during the game but it's about shaping the hearts and minds of these young men for me what i i be i concluded uh later in life is that for me, athletics were the vehicle that transported me along in life and dropped me off at the right bus stops along the way. And I'd stop for a while and learn and get back on. Athletics would take me a little further. I would have never been able to go to college if it wasn't for basketball. And I'll tell you an interesting story. When I was a senior in high school, I was the second leading scorer in the state of Pennsylvania. And so school started recruiting me. So one time we were playing this team, St. Rose of Carbondale,

Pennsylvania. And when I came out after the game, a gentleman came up to me and he introduced himself. He says, hi, my name's Jack Ramsey. I'm the coach at St. Joe's College, and we're very interested in you. So I just listened. I was always taught, you know, when grownups talk, you keep your mouth shut and you listen. And so he said, and he went on and told me a little bit about

St. Joe's and where it was located in Philadelphia and so forth. And then he said, we're going to offer your scholarship. And so he said, we'll send something to you in writing. And I thanked him in that. And so when we got on the school bus to go back, my coach said to me, he said, who was that gentleman you were talking to? i told him what had happened and and and i said to him i said coach let me ask you a question what's a scholarship i didn't even know what a scholarship was and did it was such so foreign to me and to my family that when uh later uh when it was just about time to graduate uh my grandma didn't, for some reason, I hadn't told her that about the scholarship. And so she was asking me, well, what are you going to do?

So I said, well, I'm going to go to college. And she said, well, how are you going to go to college? Who's going to pay for it? And so I said, oh, I'm getting a scholarship. And so she didn't know what the scholarship was. So I explained to her. And so it seemed like two minutes, but it was probably only 10 seconds. But she didn't say anything. So I said, well, Grandma, you look like you're puzzled. And she said, well, I am. And I said, why? She said, well, because I thought I raised you better than that.

And I said, well, you did. I think you've done a great job and and raising me and she says but i'm disappointed in myself because i can't believe that you're naive enough to think that some white people are going to pay for you to go to college just so you can play basketball it makes no sense they're tricking you she says it doesn't work and And, you know, and I was doing the hype of segregation and that. She couldn't comprehend that white, black, blue, that anybody's going to pay for your education to play basketball. Yeah, times have changed. But what was the, you know, kind of landscape of African-American athletes when you were, first of all, when you were in boarding school?

African-American athletes when you were when you first of all, when you were in boarding school? I mean, you must have been one of the few African-American students in your school to begin with. Right. And then probably about five percent of the student body were were at that time. They call this either colored or Negroes. And so there were about probably I'd say maybe 5% of the student body were what we would call today African-Americans. And obviously, we all participate in sports. One thing about the sports, from an unusual perspective, was it didn't take us long to figure out you wanted to participate in sports because you got to go off campus.

And you got certain privileges and so maybe instead of having to to go and work in the bakery in the afternoon i got to go to basketball practice or i got so i played every sport i i played baseball uh basketball football, and boxing. You were a Golden Gloves of boxing, right? Yeah, they had a Golden Glove boxing team, and so I went out for it. Whatever sport was going to get me some special privileges and get me off campus, I was for it. But basketball was the thing. Yes. And then I didn't actually start playing organized basketball until I was a freshman in high school. And I found out later, my godfather was a priest, and I found out later, probably when I was going in my senior year,

that my godfather had made a deal with the coach that regardless of how poor I played that first year, that he wouldn't cut me from the team. He'd keep me on the team. And so each year I got a little better and better. But a lot of it was because I put a lot of time in trying to master the skills. And once again, there was a little bit of a strategy there because if I went to the nuns did all the teaching at the school. And so if I went to my homeroom teacher and I said, Sister Dolores, you know, I have to have to practice from from two to five o'clock. Well, then she would she would give me permission to go over to the gym. And even in the off season, I would go in the gym every day and work on my fundamentals.

And we only had one coach. Our coach had played for the Redskins, but he coached every sport. He coached basketball, baseball, football, and boxing. And that discipline to kind of go the extra mile and practice in off hours, at the time, your perception was not, this is my ticket out or my ticket to a new life. What was the drive? Just a personal sense of wanting to be as good as you could be? Yes. I actually, at no time in my life did I ever say, well, when I grow up, I want to go to college. And never once in our household that when I was growing up did anyone ever say, George, when you grow up, we want you to go to college.

That was unheard of. No one in my family had ever gone. So why did they think I was going to go? And so as I moved along, I began to realize that participating in athletic brought some residual value for you. And so I utilized it to help myself grow and learn and get exposure because I get off campus and I get a chance to see how the rest of the world lives. Television was in its very formative stages then. And so today, a young person, he has a much broader perspective of the world than I ever had in those days. But somewhere there was the hand of God, I guess, just pushing me along and being in the right place at the right time helped me.

But I don't know if I would have ever made it other than the discipline of the nuns and the time that they invested in me and motivated me. And my homeroom teacher, my senior year her name was sister emmanuel and we went through the entire year and she would never ever say anything positive to me and um and then when she found out just being a good nun yeah and and uh and when she found out i was going to get a scholarship then i had it started to change because then they'd made me stay every day after school and I'd have to go through two hours of Latin and they were preparing me for the test and teach me word derivatives and for example, if it's a multiple choice, the first thing you do is go through and eliminate the answers that came possibly, but you saw you narrowed down. So I went through all those fundamental concepts of education.

And so when I graduated, I said to her, I said, Sister Emanuel, I said, you realize the entire year you've never said anything positive to me. And she looked at me and smiled and she said, Mr. Raubing, do you think maybe there was a method to my madness? Yeah, it seemed to work, right? Yes. Because I was always trying to do something extra just so she'd say I did a good job, and she never would.

Well, you thrive under this Catholic education umbrella, and then you take that to, not to St. Joe's, but to Villanova, continuing in the Catholic tradition, right? And you become quite a standout basketball player there. I think, what, 835 rebounds or something like that during your career successful by any stretch of the imagination but even then it wasn't about i'm going to become a professional basketball player professional basketball looked very different back then well there weren't as many teams and and um and so my my junior and senior year we we were ranked, nationally ranked. And so they had six rounds of the NBA draft at that time, and I got drafted in the second round by the Philadelphia Warriors,

which is now the Golden State Warriors. And so the owner was a guy named Eddie Gottlieb, and I went down and I met with him, and we talked, and they had a stacked lineup. They had Paul Erison and Woody Salisbury and Will Chamberlain and Guy Rogers and those type of players, most of whom went on to be in the Hall of Fame. And so it wasn't that they needed me but he did say that that i would have be challenged to make the lineup but he and he said uh this will show you the difference in compensation he said we'd be willing to sign you for 7500 right and and you were you were already

working at sunoco right at that time you were making more money in a corporate job. Yeah, Sunoco, I was in a management training program, and they were paying me more than that in the management training program. And it wasn't something that I could ever see myself making a career out of it. And as I said, I don't know one young man my age who ever said to me, boy, man, if I can just make the NBA, I'd be really happy. That wasn't a destination point for blacks in those days to play in the NBA. And I had an older cousin who went to Dartmouth and then on to Georgetown Law School and subsequently became a federal judge. And he was kind of my role model before I knew what a role model was. And so I always wanted to be like him.

And so he wore khaki pants all the time. So I wore khaki pants. Whatever he did, I did. So my idea was, okay, when I graduate, I'll go to law school, and that was my pursuit. But what's even more interesting when I look back on it, before I got to be a senior and the scholarship came into play. I can distinctly remember our school set up on a bluff

and down at the bottom was a highway and the Greyhound bus came by there. And so that was how I'd get on the Greyhound bus and take that long journey from Pennsylvania on the Greyhound bus till I got to Washington, D.C. And so I remember sitting up there waiting for the bus to come, and I was thinking to myself, boy, if I can just become a pilot in the Air Force,

I'll have it made. And that was the extent of my dreams then, was to go into the Air Force and try to become a pilot. I had no idea that I was ever going to go to college. But fate has a different path for you. And nonetheless, you get pulled back into basketball, first as an assistant coach at Villanova, while you were still working your job, right?

Yes. I might have been their original part-time assistant uh-huh but and were you the first this this starts like this wave of you being the first of in many situations so you were the first african-american assistant coach in the acc yes i was actually i was the first uh a black assistant coach at a predominantly white white college. But we didn't have all the conferences. There was no Big East in it.

There was an ACC, but there weren't a proliferation of conferences. So was Villanova part of the ACC then? At that time, Villanova was basically in a make-believe conference, and I say that because it didn't have a real conference structure to it, but it was called the Big Five, and the Big Five was LaSalle, St. Joe's, Temple, Penn, and Villanova. And so those schools in Philadelphia competed against each other, and whoever had the best record, they were the champion of the Big Five.

But basically, in those days, the Catholic schools were independent, what we call independent today. But most Catholic schools, particularly on the eastern seaboard, all had outstanding basketball teams. Whatever school you name, from Canisius to Villanova to St. Joe's to Georgetown to Loyola, they all had great basketball teams. So you must have been how old at this time, like 25 or something? Yeah, I graduated. I went to Villanova 56 to like 25 or something? Yeah, I graduated. I went to Villanova 56 to 60, and I was 20 when I graduated from Villanova.

So you're right. I'd be right around 25. Right. So that's probably like around 1962 or something like that. Right. So this is all happening set against the backdrop, a pretty tumultuous time in our history with the civil rights movement and what was going on down in Selma with, you know, Dr. King, etc. And you start to get interested in this movement by way of a friend and a family friend who kind of, you know, initiate you into these conversations about, you know, sort of race in America, which then leads you to show up

on the mall in 1963 to hear Dr. King. So walk us through this extraordinary experience that you have. Well, this is one of those situations. I know you've told the story a million times, but I'm going to make you do it. This is one of those situations that I characterized earlier when I said that being in the right place at the right time. On a Wednesday night, my best friend, he lived in Claymont, Delaware. And Claymont, Delaware is right on the border of Pennsylvania. And from Villanova to Claymont is maybe an hour and some change.

And so I was down at their house for dinner. And my friend's name was Warren Wilson. His dad was a very prominent black dentist in Wilmington. And so we were having dinner. And in those days, the family is always gathered for the evening meal. And there was always a conversation. And so Dr. Wilson asked us if we were going to go to the march on Washington that weekend, and we said no, and he asked us why not. He said, this is going to be a historic moment. You guys should be there.

And so we gave him one of those adolescent excuses. We didn't have any money or way to get there so he said well i can fix that so he let us use the car and he gave us money to go down there so that friday we hopped in the car and we drove down to dc and uh and we got a uh a motel room on at that time there was route one was was the only thoroughfare in and out of D.C. going north and south. And so we found a hotel room or motel room on New York Avenue and we decided that we'd drive down that evening, Friday evening, and just get our bearings and see what was going

on. And while we were down there, we ran into this guy and he said, hey, are you coming tomorrow? And we said, Yes. And he said, Well, would you guys be interested in volunteering? And we said, For what? He said, Oh, we're going to have twice as many people as we thought we were going to have, and so we're going to have to have a double security,

so we're looking for volunteers. Would you guys want to volunteer? And we said, Yes. So he said, Be down here tomorrow morning at 9. And we woke up early and got down there. And we got down there about 8, maybe 8.15. And we found them. And he said, wow, you guys are- Darrell Bock Right on the steps of Lake La Morella. Darrell Bock On the mall. Yeah, the mall there, where the reflecting pool and that is. And so he said, you guys are here early. He said, well, we're going to double the security up at the speaker's podium because they had

people speaking. John Lewis, who's now in Congress, was one of the early speakers that day. So it started from nine in the morning and King was the last speaker late in the evening around five. All day, people speaking. Yes. There's one speaker and everyone had like six minutes right five minutes everybody was limited to five minutes and they

you had to uh to give them an advanced copy of a speech for approval and they made john lewis change his about 10 times uh ball when james ball when to change his, and so they wouldn't let Baldwin speak. And so even King, the original speech was five minutes. And so what happened was there was a security structure, and particularly for king as soon as he was done speaking we were to surround engulf him and take him out the back way and we had a an exit plan if if there was some kind of overt demonstration or violence were you were you up on the by the podium the whole day or just for dr king uh pictures yeah uh no i was up there the whole day

and and and uh we we got a break every now and then to go get to grab us there was a place in the back where you could go and get a sandwich and something uh cold to drink and that but basically i was on duty uh the entire time and so throughout throughout the course of the day, people were still coming in. And by the time King got up to speak, the place was, as far as you could see, was human humanity. In fact, when we left that evening around 7.30 to head back up to Delaware, the people were still trying to get into D.C. And it was over. And it was bumper to bumper until we got to Baltimore.

People still trying. Right. There's famous footage and images of just a sea of people all the way down the reflecting pool. So, King got up to speak and he was going through his prepared text. And he gets to a point when I would suggest he's probably three-quarters of the way through the prepared text. And you hear a female voice say, tell him about the dream, Martin. Tell him about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream. What's seated behind King were Mahalia Jackson, who most people would suggest is the greatest gospel singer of all time, and Marian Anderson.

She had sang the national anthem. And so it was Mahalia Jackson who had encouraged Martin to tell about the dream. And so what was the dream? The dream part, King had used in a speech in Detroit earlier that week, and he had used it in Selma. And Mahalia Jackson was on both of those programs. So she was familiar with it and obviously inspired by it. And so at this point, King was the last speaker,

and some people would say that he was the keynote speaker, but that wasn't true. They put King last because they know he would hold the crowd. And so at that point, he deviates from the speech and ad-libs in the I Have a Dream portion. And as a result was, he was the only speaker who went past the five minute mark. Was there a moment when you standing next to him knew, like, was it palpable in the moment?

Like, okay, he's not referring to his notes anymore. No, because I didn't have the notes. I didn't have the notes at that point. But like sort of kicking into a high gear like king king was such a a a highly skilled orator that he you you were mesmerized your your thought process certainly was and particularly for me uh i didn't i didn't have the knowledge or or analytical skills to try to to uh dissect his speech and and that i was just like everybody else i was just like being in church on sunday you know and and uh and so uh once king finished uh the place went

berserk and uh so now we started to close in and as you can see by the picture, just as he begins to finish the speech and is moving away from the podium, he's folding it. And we actually have on the video King folding the speech, and I said to him, Dr. King, can I have that speech? And he handed it to me. You actually have that on video? Yeah, CBS found it in the archives. I said to him, Dr. King, can I have that speech? And he handed it to me. You actually have that on video? Yeah, it's CBS found in the archives. Is it online anywhere? Oh, yeah, it's on my website. Oh, it is? Okay, I'm going to share that.

If you look at the James, there's about five different networks have done documentaries, but the one with CBS with James Brown, you can see it. All right, I'll check that out. And so- So you just spontaneously have this idea that you might ask a question. Yeah, I don't know why. I'd love to have some great story that I had this whole thing premeditated, but I didn't. And so just as he handed it to me, the rabbi who was saying the benediction said to him,

Dr. King, that's the greatest speech I've ever heard. I loved your speech. And so his tension switched from me and his focus to the rabbi, and that was the end of it. And I just stuck it in my pocket. And then when it was over, we ushered him out. So now the leadership group, A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King and Byron Rustin and those people who led the march, they all go to the White House to meet the president. And when they walk into the Oval Office, President Kennedy says, Dr. King, he says, I loved your I Have a Dream speech.

The speech has no title, but the media picked up on it and called it the I Have a Dream speech, which was unusual because that really was never intended. It wasn't even in the text. No, it wasn't even in the text. And so that became the way that it was given its name by the media. But it was just a magnificent time. King had spent a lot of time the night before writing and rewriting the speech,

and he actually grappled with trying to figure out how to get the I Have a Dream portion in, but it wasn't going to meet the timeline, and so he ultimately left it out. But they let him go on for like it was like 16 minutes yeah well once he got up there at that point there was no there was no stopping him and and the crowd would have gone berserk if they tried to because they had told people that hey if you if you go over we're just going to cut the mic but he was the last one up yes yes and i mean uh uh what what does someone say don't mess with history yeah well speaking of history so this speech goes down as you know arguably one of the greatest speeches in american history if not the history of humanity

up there with you know jack kennedy's inauguration speech and the Gettysburg Address. In the moment, was there a sense of that level of momentousness? I don't think so, because I don't know that black people were ever allowed to think in such grand terms. Who would have ever thought that there would be a moment in history when there was an evaluation of speeches that moved the nation and moved the nation's conscience. And one of them would be by a black person. But we have to also be mindful that it took 50 years. You know, Malcolm X said one time that history is best situated to reward all man's deeds. And so my interpretation of that is history is best situated to place things in a historic context as it related to other speeches

that had a meaningful effect on our social system and our values. And meanwhile, you have the actual text. You stick it in a book that was... Yeah, I had the actual speech. Harry Truman's biography that he personally cited. The book is right behind you in the bookcase. You've got to show that to me when we're done. Yeah.

So what happened, my senior year in college, I played an East-West All-Star game in Kansas City, and they took us out to Independence, Missouri to meet President Truman. And when we were out there, when he was done visiting with us, he had about three tables with books stacked high on him and uh he had written this two uh volume uh uh set uh of on on his presidency and so he gave each of us a set and mine says to george ralph it's got the date 1960 and to George Rao from Harry S. Truman. And both of them were signed like that.

So I put the speech inside of it because I knew I would, one, I'd remember, two, that I would never throw those books away because how many people can say that they have a personally autographed book by the President of the United States? And so... But you actually don't

end up really remembering it right it sort of escapes your memory so for 25 years for 25 years i never thought about it my wife didn't even know no one knew i had it and i and i never talked about it because at that point it hadn't taken on its historic significance even after the assassination no when i how it became public was when i went from uh washington state as head basketball coach to iowa when i got to iowa obviously the first black uh head coach there and so at that time most of the major newspapers had a sunday magazine section that came with it the new york times is one of the few papers that still have have their own and so the cedar rapids gazette sent a reporter down to do this story on me and so as uh going through the questions i call it a throwaway question he just said to me uh uh coach were you ever involved in the civil rights movement i said kind of and he said what

do you mean kind and i explained to him what happened and he said oh my god you have the speech where is it and i said it's down in the basement in some boxes because i'd only been there about two or three weeks and i hadn't unpacked yet. And so we go down in the basement and we find it. And I thought the guy was going to have a heart attack. He was hyperventilating. And then he called the sports editor and said, oh my God, you can't believe what happened. And he asked, was it okay to send a photographer down

to take a picture of it? And so that was the first time that anyone knew that I had the speech. But even then, it didn't cause a gigantic uproar. I used to keep it on the wall in my office. But then once it became, the government officially anointed a day for Martin Luther King Day, now people, the story was getting around. ESPN had it on. Digger Phelps would always bring it up on a program that, you know, Coach Raveling has the original speech.

And so more and more people start to understand that i had it and my wife got a little nervous because she felt yeah you travel a lot uh to get the house yeah somebody break into the house so she said you we got to move it out and put it out of the book yeah and so we we we moved it out of the house because, and she always said back in those days, make sure you keep saying publicly it's not in the house because I don't want somebody breaking into our house. But it would be, if it were still in the house now, there would be a more likelihood that someone would probably try to break into the house now because we live in such an unstable environment. But in those days, I don't know that there was any real threat to us. And people weren't really, I mean,

such a large city like Los Angeles, people weren't even sure where I lived. Right. So, over the years, I'm sure there's been suitors, people trying to buy this from you. Estimates run anywhere from a couple million bucks all the way up to like $25 million. You've repeatedly refused to sell it. But I would imagine, and I can understand the reasons behind that, and I want to dig into that a little bit more deeply, but it must have occurred to you, you know, why not share it with, you know, the Smithsonian, put it on loan so, you know, everybody can enjoy it. I agree with you and that's exactly what we're going to do. I've been consistently saying that I was going to leave it to my son when I die and that's still my intention.

But even- As long as he doesn't sell it yes as long as he doesn't sell it and so uh about two years ago the gentleman who was the producer of the CBS documentary on on me having the speeches of a young man named Alvin Patrick and he had encouraged me to go down and meet with the people at the new african-american uh museum which is part of the smithsonian and i went down and i met with them they were very gracious and and it is our intention to to get i think it's it just opened a few weeks ago and so it's always that beautiful new they just built it right yeah i was just in washington last week i saw it it's that beautiful new, they just built it, right? Yes. Yeah, it was just in Washington last week I saw it. It's a magnificent looking building. Yeah, and so ultimately within the next 12 months, it'll be housed there.

Oh, that's fantastic. That's great. So I can't help but wonder, you know, you keep characterizing this as right place, right time. But on some level, it almost seems faded. time, but on some level, it almost seems faded. You know, you are this sort of paradigm-breaking person in sports in that, you know, being the first African-American assistant coach at Villanova and then going on to coach at University of Washington and then Washington State, Iowa, and USC, and at each one of those sort of train stops, you know, being the first African-American coach, you know, again, set against this, you know, kind of interesting time in the evolution of civil rights. And then being the, you know, sort of repository of this landmark speech on some level, doesn't the message seep through to you?

Like, you know, I'm there's a reason behind all of this. Like, what is the responsibility that you feel to, you know, speak to these issues as somebody who is carrying on in the tradition of Dr. King and somebody who has himself, you know, broken through barriers? Well, I think uh with each passing year i be i became much more aware of of of what was the larger world around me uh and i i grew to understand that uh that we lived out the cliches of the last hired and the first fired, that we live in ghettos. When I was growing up, I never even realized I lived in a ghetto until I got to Villanova and took a sociology class.

And I mean, I was perfectly happy with my life, even though most of it was in a boarding school. But as I grew older, I began to put my life and my pursuits in a broader context. And I realized that one of the impediments that I was going to carry with me for the rest of my life was my pigmentation, and people were going to judge me differently. But over the years, I also grew to understand that the one thing that most people respect about another person is their intellect. Whether you're black or white, whatever, they might still have misgivings about you, but they will respect your intellect. And so I try to compensate by being an information gatherer, a knowledge gatherer, trying to learn as much as I could so that I could effectively

compete in our social system. Even if I had all the hardships and the drapings that came with segregation or discrimination, at the end of the day, it was incumbent upon me to figure out how can I successfully compete in this environment? What are the skills I need? What are the things I need to do? And one of those things was obviously to be able to have a courageous voice and stand up and speak out against injustice. speak out against injustice. Everybody can't be Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Stokey Carmichael or Huey Newton. I think all of us have a role to play in life, and we have to figure out what that role is, and we have to play it. But at the end of the day we have to accept the responsibility that that we it's a moral

obligation to speak out against uh injustice and inequality and and um here we are today and and it's a it's a more sophisticated type of of uh of discrimination and and And it's now not something that is just discrimination against a person because of the pigmentation of their skin. There's discrimination against women. There's discrimination against gays. There's discrimination against Latinos in that and and and and so it's become a societal problem in a real sense I remember Monaghan in his report Senator Monaghan when he did the report on Black America he suggested that the number one problem in Black America was was was the broken home structure that you had this ever-growing population

of black people, black children who were being raised in single-parent households and because of the judicial system, the courts tended to award the child to the woman, the mother. And so they were growing up in a home without male role models, without male supervision. But what we soon began to realize that over the coming years, it really wasn't a black problem. It was an American problem because we have equal amount of white children who grow up in single parent households too. who grow up in single-parent households, too. And so, over the course of time, the so-called social and discriminatory systems became cancerous, and they grew.

And they started to spread out beyond the black communities and into white communities and the Latin communities and the Asian communities. And so over the years, I've watched this racial demographic journey to here I go from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles. I live in a city now in Los Angeles where the ethnic breakdown is the dominant ethnic group in Los Angeles are Latinos, Asians, blacks, whites. So much progress has been made. You know, here we are in the, you know, the twilight of, you know, the eight years of the Obama administration, first African American president,

you know, professionals, the NBA, the NFL is got to be around 80% African American at this point, in terms of players, which is a massive shift from your days of being a player and perhaps the early days of you coaching. And yet we're also in a social and political climate that seems more divided than ever. So when you think about, you had mentioned earlier, we all have a role to play. How do you think about and articulate how you see yourself? Like, what is your role? Like, how would you define what your role in this grand play is i see myself as a servant leader i think at this joint juncture in my life i'm

kind of on the other side of the mountain now at 79 and so i i fully recognize it's no longer about me it's about them and so i have to reach reach out and try to positively affect as many lives as I can. And so my mission every day is to be a positive difference maker in as many lives of people as I can, black folks and white folks. And I try to target young people and share with them my life lessons in hopes that, my grandma used to say, if you listen to me, I can help you avoid some of the potholes in the road. And so to this day, I still feel that that's my mission,

to help other people avoid some of the potholes in the road because I've lived the life that they they have to live and so I'm going to spend all of the rest of my remaining life trying to be a positive difference maker in as many lives as I as I possibly can and and you know when I look back now in my life I've I've lived a variety of lives you know, when I look back now in my life, I've lived a variety of lives, you know. I truly believe when I look back on my life that you live your life in buckets, say 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40. But when I was 40 years old, I was no longer the person I was when I was 30 years old. And at 79, I'm not the same person I was at 69. What's the biggest difference?

I think, one, you're in a constant, your values change, your interests change, your health changes, your thinking changes. And then you get to a point where where you have no choice anymore about changing technologies come as has ushered into my life and and and force me to take on a whole new existence i mean i i have to learn the language of technology i have to learn the utilization of technology i have to learn the the value that it creates for me. And fortunately, it came at a time in my life with the proper use of technology, it's allowed me to remain relevant in a time in my life that's very important because now I'm able to transfer from old thinking to new thinking, from old knowledge to new knowledge, to be successful and compete in society today. We have to relearn things. We have to rethink things. We have uh acquire new knowledge that that's relevant in this time

i would imagine it gets it must get harder as you get older i mean most people who are you know settling into their 70s and and 80s are kind of you know the catchphrase or you're just stuck in your ways like you at some point that evolution sort of stops and you know you're just not going to get the new iphone you know it's not going to happen or you're just not going to get the new iPhone. You know, it's just not going to happen. Or you're not going to figure out the new TV remote. You know, it's like you draw a line in the sand and you're like done. But what I'm hearing you say is you are committed to. You're only done if you think you're done. Well, the amazing thing is you have this incredibly robust website.

Like when I went to your website the first time, I thought, oh, so it'll have your bio. You know, I didn't expect there to be very much content. And yet, there's all kinds of articles there and podcasts and video interviews and, you know, the book club. And here's my monthly, you know, recommendations for what you should be reading, like a ton of amazing, really helpful, inspiring content. And I thought, wow, this guy's like really with what's going on right now. And that must take, you know, a level of attention and energy and focus that I think most people at your age probably just aren't that interested in. Well, go back to what I said before is that I can control my environment now. So I don't – you rarely ever see me other than with and my wife is not the

same age that but you you rarely ever see me hang around with or associate with people that are my own age i'll i'll be you and ryan holiday hanging out no i'm i i hang around i hang around with younger people because they help me think young they teach me how to use technology uh i can listen to them and and and and and they're all the young people are my mentors they're they're they're the ones that are they're my teachers they're my professors right now and and they stimulate me because the if i hang around with people my own age the talk's always going to be about the past and the now. Young people are talking about, they're looking into the future. They're defining what the future is.

And so I find it stimulating to be around them and to listen and hang on to their coattail. Because if I hang on, they're going to drag me into the future with them. And that's where I want to be. hang on, they're going to drag me into the future with them. And that's where I want to be. My biggest challenge is I'm an African-American, ex-basketball coach, 69 years old. How do I stay relevant in this contemporary time? I don't want to be put in a position where I'm living my life in reverse.

I want to live my life going forward. And so what I've done is I boiled it down to this equation and this question. And the question I ask myself on a consistent basis is this. myself on a consistent basis is this what is it that i don't know but i need to know to remain relative and competitive and growing and prospering in this today's society and and then i constantly search for what i don't know but what i need to know and the great part about it is is all i got to do is go on my iphone hit google and i can and i can educate myself i told my wife the other day i said you know what i'm tired of hearing them night after night quoting these polls and and with as if we are to accept those as being valid because i have all kind of

questions okay who did you poll i'm 79 never have been polled once in my life. How many people did you poll? What were the questions that you asked? What was their political affiliation? I got a lot of things. So I told my wife, I said, you know what? I'm going to educate myself so that I can critically analyze and think about this thing about polls and i'm going to start questioning all

these assumptions about polls so i google and i and i and i on i went on google and i asked for books on uh on political polls and about 20 of them came up and so i i picked out five of them and i ordered them and i'm going to read it and 60 days from now I am going to be challenging people. You're going to be an expert on polling come November. Yeah, I'm going to challenge people and I'm going to challenge the networks when they give us this. I mean Quinnipiac or New York Times or Wall Street's poll, you know, what makes their

opinion any more valid than your opinion or my opinion? Yeah, there's a lot of science that goes into crafting those questions to drive a certain result. Well, I could talk to you about this stuff for like six hours, but I know we're on a little bit of a leash here. Well, we've got to do it again. Well, I'm just sitting here thinking while you're answering. I'm like, there's no way I'm going to get to all the stuff I want to talk to you about. So you're going to definitely have to come back and we can fill in the gaps. want to talk to you about. So you're going to definitely have to come back and we can fill in the gaps. But maybe we can shift gears a little bit here and just talk about coaching in general.

You know, this has been your career. You're one of the great legendary coaches of all time. So I'm interested in your thoughts about how you perceive the importance of coaching and what are the distinguishing features of a great coach? What makes a great coach great? Well, I'll try to answer the last part of it first. I think what makes a great coach great is his ability or her ability to consistently get the athlete to operate at peak efficiency, to get the absolute best out of each individual and to motivate them to greater heights. To me, coaching is one of the greatest honors you can

ever have in your lifetime. And so why do I feel that way? Because a parent is going to take their most valuable possession, their child, and they're going to put them in your hands and they're going to allow you to influence them. And so you have a huge responsibility. I recruited a young man named Mark Boyd from Stone Mountain, Georgia, when I was at USC. And after his mom signed the letter of intent and she was walking me to the door, she looked at me and she said, Coach Ravlin, I don't want no foolishness out of you now. And I knew what she meant. Hey, I've raised this young man with a certain value system and I expect you to expand on that. I expect you to respect that. And so to me, I feel sincerely, and this was a motivating factor with me,

if all a young man learned during the four years he was with me, because in those days you didn't have one and done, if all I taught him was how to shoot jump shots and rebound and play defense and win basketball games, hell, he could have gone anywhere and got that. I want the four years with me to be a unique experience. I want the things that he learned to spill over from the basketball court into everyday life. You have a responsibility as a coach to tell him how the game athletics prepares him for the game of life because at the end of the day the most important game to win is the game of life and so what's your core philosophy

at the bottom of that like what well i think it there's it's it's a system that it's a secondary system of education you learn so much about life lessons from participation in athletics. You learn you don't win all the time. You don't lose all the time. You learn you have to sacrifice. You have to be a team player. You have to be teachable and coachable. You have to play with whites and blacks and Hispanics.

You learn that you've got to be a listener. You've got to make quick decisions on the run. You learn that you've got to be a listener. You've got to make quick decisions on the run. There's so many things that you learn from athletics. You learn leadership. And so all these things are the early preparation for your transformation from participating in sports, and you take those values with you into society and and uh and but we have to get people to to see the connection between their participation and its preparation for you

in the future very small uh a segment of of kids are going to make it to the NBA, and probably less than 1% of the black kids in America are ever going to play in the NBA. But their participation can be more important and should be more important than participating in the NBA. And that's what bothers me about this one and done. That's what bothers me about this one and done. One and done puts too much emphasis on material things and money and not enough emphasis on education. That's what I worry about.

I don't deny that a young person is physically talented enough to participate at that level, but does he have the educational fundamentals that he's going to need? If you're making $100 million a year, you can't even sit in a meeting and ask an intelligent question because you don't have the educational background. Well, and if you don't have a mature character, then you're probably going to make some bad decisions. Absolutely. And I used to do a talk called Voices and Choices. And the thesis is that the voices you listen to are the ones that determine the choices that you make. And so at the end of the day, if you listen to enough of the right voices, you'll make the right

choices. If you listen to enough to the wrong voices, you're make the right choices. If you listen enough to the wrong voices, you're going to make bad choices. And I think today, when you look at the compensation for professional athletics, education is more important today than it ever was. If you can couple education with a professional career and the compensation that you have, you can help change the world. But you've got to be able to put the physical with the mental. See, there's far too much emphasis on the physical now and not enough emphasis on the mental.

Is that what you would characterize as the most common mistake or misstep that most coaches make? Absolutely. And it starts on the basketball court because you hear of all the skill development today in athletics. But it's so out of balance because all the skill development does with the physical. There's no one spending a whole lot of time working with the athlete on the mental part of the game. If you can combine the physical with the mental, ooh, you got a heck of a thing going for you now.

One of the things that everybody says about you is that you're this amazing recruiter. You had an eye and an ability to really spot talent, like above and beyond. So when you are in that capacity, what are you looking for? Like what is the defining characteristic of the great athlete or, you know, the unpolished gem? Or, you know, what is the difference between somebody who in your eyes is good or has the potential to be good and that rare special athlete who could be

fantastic i don't know that it's any one thing i i would think at the end of the day uh some of the things i i try to look at an athlete and and and and not look at necessarily where he is now where she is now but where can they be five years or 10 years from now? Are they coachable? Are they teachable? Do they have a passion for the game? What type of skills do they have? Have they reached their ceiling?

And one of the reasons I think I achieved success at Washington State was because I was never able to get the superstar. I think in recruiting, anybody can go out and watch Willie Mazur or O.J. Simpson play and conclude that they're going to be a star, but it's that guy that's a notch. I mean, let's take the present day of flavor of the month, Steph Curry. I mean, most of his life, he's been in a constant battle to prove people wrong. He's too small. He's too thin. He can't guard anybody.

too small he's too thin he can't guard anybody but but he he took that and used it as a motivator to to propel him where he is today and and so now he's he's the mvp of the league but we have to remember uh he couldn't get a scholarship coming out of high davison picked him up at the end virginia tech wouldn't even take him as a walk-on whereas dad would have scholarship coming out of high school. Davidson picked him up at the end. Virginia Tech wouldn't even take him as a walk-on, whereas Dad went to school. Do you think he could have spotted him out of high school? Do I think? No, I don't know that I would have. I might have been a little bit more intrigued of him

because of his ability to shoot the ball, because at the end of the day, the game of basketball comes down to putting the ball in the basket and stopping it from getting in the basket. And so he had a unique skill right away. He knew how to get it in the basket. All those other offenses and all that stuff are fine, but you don't need an offense for Steph Curry.

Just give him the ball. He gets across half court. He picks it up, shoot, boom, goes in the basket. And it simplifies the game in the process i gotta let you go we're at our time limit and i can't believe it because we didn't even talk about all the things that you do at nike i wanted to talk to you about the we're going to do it all kinds of stuff i'm sitting here with all these notes that i didn't even get to but uh this has been brilliant and amazing.

You're quite the inspiring character. I really appreciate your time. It's an absolute pleasure to talk to you, so thanks a lot. I wanted to kind of get like these modern TV shows now where there's a Q&A where the person that's being asked the questions, they start interviewing the person who's doing it. So I didn't even get a chance to – Maybe I need a new co-host. You can come in every once in a while.

No, no. Heck, I want to talk to you about swimming at Stanford and go back. Heck, I had teams with five guys who, if I combined all their SATs, they couldn't have gotten to Stanford. Times change. I don't think I could get in there anymore now either. But fantastic. Thank you very much.

Thank you. If you're digging on this, the best way to connect with you, you're all over the place, but your website is coachgeorgeravelling.com. Yes. And on there, you can find the podcast and the videos and all kinds of articles. Yeah, I put up five new books every month. There's easily a book. So what are the books on the list? Maybe we can leave everybody with a reading list.

Well, the book of the month is Ryan's book on ego. Ah, of course. Everybody already knows about that one. What's the other book that you tend to hand out quite a bit? Actually, one of the books that I recommend is an old book. It's called What They Don't Teach at Harvard Business School by Mark McCormick. That was a book that greatly influenced my life. There's a book out now that I think is a little bit of a sleeper book.

I don't remember the author's name now, but it's called Practice Perfect. I have it on a coffee table in my office. And one of my good friends is a professor at Wharton School in Penn, and she was the one who pointed it out to the book to me. And what made me go buy the book immediately was, she said, this is one of the best business books I've read in a long time.

And she reads 100 books a year. So the fact that she said it was one of the best she ever read i went out and got it and it's called practice perfect i don't recall the author's name now but i'll put i'll put a link to it in the show notes for people that want to check it out but as you can see uh from my my collection here i i really i really have uh quite a few things here yeah yeah it's pretty cool and uh you're on twitter at george raveling you got a facebook page all that kind of stuff so uh reach out to george tell him you enjoyed the interview and uh let's do this again really absolutely when you you let me know we'll get on each other's calendar if i have to come out

to malibu i'll come out to malibu. All right, we'll cook a meal for you. Yep. Great, thank you. Peace. Plants. All right, what'd you guys think? That was something, right? I feel like Coach would make for a great recurring guest on the show. Not only, again, to fill in all the life experiences that we didn't quite get to during this conversation, but also, you know, maybe some directed Q& a, I mean, the guy has so much wisdom. I feel like I

just want to put a microphone in front of him and talk to him quite a bit more than I had the opportunity to do today. So let me know what you guys think about that idea. Send me a Facebook post or a tweet or better yet, why don't you leave a comment on Reddit? That would actually be a great and really organized place to present any future questions that you may have for coach or just anything related to the podcast. And the way you do that is there's a subreddit underneath my name. Just go to reddit.com forward slash r forward slash rich roll. That's reddit.com forward slash r forward slash rich roll. I think it's just like one location where we can kind of create some community and some dialogue and some discussion related to the podcast guests and what you guys would like to see in

future episodes as well as Q&A stuff. So check that out. As always, please make a note to check out the show notes. You can find that on the episode page for this episode at richroll.com. you can find that on the episode page for this episode at richroll.com i got tons of links and all kinds of stuff to explore george's life further beyond the earbuds if you haven't done so already uh why don't you subscribe to my newsletter in addition to weekly podcast updates uh i'm going to send you exclusive access to something i call roll call which is a really short email blast every Thursday that just has some instructive recommendations, some resources, a few things I've discovered, enjoyed, found helpful. I'm not going to spam you. It's a pretty brief email and people seem to be

enjoying it. So if that sounds like something you might be into, you can sign up for that on my website, richroll.com. Also mad love to everybody who helped put on the show this week. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production. Sean Patterson for all his help on graphics. Chris Swan for production assistance and help compiling the show notes. And theme music, as always, by Anilema. Thanks for all the support, you guys. I love you.

See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Thank you.