«I can still see Calvin Murphy getting 62 points, and I can still see flashbacks from the pictures of Wilt getting 100, ... You go from the biggest to the smallest. The wonders of the game, from the guys playing pickup to the kids shooting in Indiana to the inner city kid who finds a way out through the sport of basketball - and I don't mean necessarily to the NBA - are embodied in this game. It doesn't take wealth or pure size. It takes heart, repetition, talent. All that stuff is embodied in the game. When I walk through that building, it's embodied there.»

«That place gives me goose bumps,»

«Mr. Basketball. It's really that simple, ... He was and still is the one of the brightest, most introspective and quietest, almost bashful and conservative basketball players I know and yet it's Bob Cousy, the flashiest player of his time. The forerunner of all the things we see today. Mr. Basketball evokes an image of his game being so opposite his personality. The honor of having him present me is terrific.»

«John Thompson took something that could be perceived as almost menacing, because he was so big and was so serious looking, and used that to his advantage to create Hoya Paranoia, ... Every game they played, John was the underdog and yet he had Ewing and Wingate and Williams. That takes a masterful genius to do that.»

«Elvin Hayes was such an incredible scorer that it was hard for me to believe, ... I had seen Bob Pettit do it to some degree, he was 6-foot-9, but Elvin Hayes took it to a different level. He was a scoring machine who went outside at 6-foot-9 and that was so foreign to what we knew. He never really got the credit he deserved for what he accomplished.»

«He was a Hall of Fame coach in his own right at UMass, ... But playing in the Yankee Conference, he was never going to get the recognition.»

«It's funny, New England is the birthplace of basketball, but we are somewhat underrepresented in the Hall of Fame, ... I would like to see Jimmy Walker in there. Holy Cross. They were the epitome. Later on, with Dave Gavitt and the Providence teams.»

«Roscoe Baker, Jimmy Walker, Billy Blair, Dennis Lynch - so many names - we would go into the heart of Roxbury and play, ... The name of the local team was the Roxbury Royals. They had a court that you could see into from the apartment buildings, so it was like a double-deck and they played their opening theme song loudly and it was `School's Out.'»

«I would hope that I represent them,»

«The game has taken me back to Springfield and I am so deeply honored and humbled to be in such a sacred place.»