If you're afraid to fail, you'll never succeed.

I’m a big believer in starting with high standards and raising them. We make progress only when we push ourselves to the highest level. If we don’t progress, we backslide into bad habits, laziness and poor attitude.

But we've got to work. We can't just live on reputations at all - by any means.

Gold medals aren't really made of gold. They're made of sweat, determination, and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.

If you want to train and work hard 3 months out of the year, well, then, UNI is a great place to go. If you want to bust your tail 6 months out of the year, you should be very happy at ISU. But if you want to train and develop into a champion 12 months out of the year, then Iowa is the place for you.

All I worried about was what Owings was doing to me, instead of what I was doing to him. When you start worrying about that stuff, you're going down the wrong path.

The obvious goals were there- State Champion, NCAA Champion, Olympic Champion. To get there I had to set an everyday goal which was to push myself to exhaustion or, in other words, to work so hard in practice that someone would have to carry me off the mat.