The manager is by himself. He can't mingle with his players. I enjoyed my players, but I could not socialize with them so I spent a lot of time alone in my hotel room. Those four walls kind of close in on you.
I have had situations in the past when you are close to signing a player and the money involved switches from euros to pounds to dollars. It is a difficult process, but one we have to work with.
Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you-trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.
And if there come the singers, and the dancers and the flute players - buy of their gifts also. For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and fod for your soul.
I was never great, but I was a good [basketball] player, and I could play seriously. Now I'm like one of these old guys who's running around, and the guys I play with, who are all a lot younger, they sort of pity me and sympathize with me. They tolerate me, but we all know that I'm the weak link on the court. And I don't like being the weak link.
I'm not saying that they were Einsteins; they were marginal students. But every ballplayer whoever touched me has moved up his station in life. And the players moved up my station.
If you've had a bad experience with an agent, you have to move past it. You are bound to want a player at some stage who is represented by this guy and you will have to try to work around the personality of the agent. You tend to work out what makes them tick, what they respond to. You have to have tactical plans to get a deal over the line.