David Lattin Quotations

One of the reasons it's so important to me is it has allowed me to reach out to youngsters, explain to them where we came from, what we did, why the game was so important. We could compete with anybody. They can win as well and do anything they want to do if they want to do it bad enough.

Some of the things really happened. Some of them are just a movie.

It was a gentleman type of game. They played hard to win, and we played hard to win.

I was 6-6, 240 pounds and didn't look like a very nice guy out there so nobody ever threw a racial slur at me. There were some things that happened a couple of times to my teammates, and I came to their rescue, but nobody ever said anything to me. I had a bald head, never smiled?they wanted no part of me. There was one scene in the movie where one of our players is beaten up in a restaurant bathroom and his head gets shoved in the toilet, but that never happened. If anybody would've stuffed one of my guys heads in the toilet like that, they wouldn't have lived to tell about it. There's nothing Haskins or anybody else could've said to stop me from doing something really bad to those guys. Again, that's the movie stuff. Good for dramatics, but I'd never let that happen.

All of the sudden you saw teams in the South like Houston go get players like Don Chaney and Elvin Hayes -- that probably doesn't happen so quickly if we don't win.