The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.

My family was poor, my father drove a cab for a living, but we felt normal because everybody else was in the same boat.

These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren't any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.

We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.

The NBA wasn't a big deal at that time, so it wasn't really in my career plans.

There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.

Every jock gets up and tells the world how lucky he is. But I feel that I may be the luckiest one of all in terms of timing and being at the right place at the right moment-even though, for the last 30 years, I was told I was born 20 years too soon, for obvious reasons.