My parents were both physicians. The family physician type, not fancy researchers or anything like that. I picked up a sense of this idea that you do serve, you serve people actually. It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think they ever said that in any explicit term, but you could just see in terms of how — individual patients weren’t discussed — but just certain things were discussed, and you could see that that was important that you were doing something bigger than yourself. You were doing something for society. For some reason I was able to pick up on that, so I think that influenced. Especially my mother, who was a physician, who spent a lot of her hours in the office talking to her patients, and she would say talking was so important for many of her patients. Sometimes there weren’t even obvious things that a physician could do something about, but she said it meant a lot to them.

They were local. They tended to be the math teacher at junior high school, Jack Druckman, the math teacher in high school, Irene Finkel, who ran and supported the math team. They tended to be very local heroes. I was never one at those times for distant heroes and truly heroic legendary heroes. They were the local teachers who really made a huge difference in my life.

Oh, yes, I had teachers at Wheaton. A community high school history teacher named Elizabeth Duncan who taught American history and was a great teacher. Very forceful, very insistent that we write essays to answer questions, and not short answers. Somebody who through force of personality made history interesting and important.

My wife, Nellie, my high school sweetheart. She helped me in so many ways. I suppose people today might say it’s hard to believe, but I was an extremely shy person. Maybe being raised in the country had something to do with it. She got me to go to take public speaking classes, which I probably wouldn’t have done. I know that was of great help to me. And then, in so many other ways. She was a year behind me in high school. I’ve got a picture of us when she was 15 and I was 16. I don’t know why but, when we met, it was just love at first sight. She is the only girl I ever went with. I was a year ahead of her and I went away to college. Then, she graduated from high school and worked, and we didn’t get to see each other that much because times were hard. Even though it’s only 70 or 80 miles from Lafayette to Burnsville, the bus might have been 10 or 15 cents. I didn’t have it and she didn’t either. We didn’t get together much but we knew as soon as I graduated and got a job, we would get married and we did. She was a tremendous influence in so many ways. I’d say that my college coach, Piggie Lambert, is one of the most principled persons I’ve ever known. He had a lot of effect on my life. The head of the English Department at Purdue University, Dr. Creek, took a liking to me and tried to get me to forget sports completely and just concentrate on becoming a college English professor. There was some sort of a scholarship that he could get me for graduate school, but, I wanted to get married and get a job. So, I’d say that my father and mother, I don’t want to neglect my mother, and my wife and Piggie Lambert, my college coach at Purdue, probably had more influence on what I became as a teacher. That’s all I was: a teacher. That’s all I was as a basketball coach, just a teacher.

The world would say it was failure. But the difference was so small between us. They played great, but they lost.

In ’91, we were playing Nevada Las Vegas, and they’d won 45 in a row. It was almost like it would be okay to lose. Everybody would say, “Oh, that’s all right.” That, to me, was the biggest obstacle. I was most proud of that game, because, as a leader, I helped my group overcome rationalization at the highest level. When we beat them, and then beat Kansas for the National Championship, everyone was saying, “Boy, you won the National Championship,” but for me, it was amazing because I got over that final hurdle, as a leader and a teacher.