Neverisms Read online

Lombardi was one of America’s most iconic coaches, best remembered for taking the Green Bay Packers to five NFL championship titles during his nine seasons as their coach and general manager (1959 through 1968). He also said:

  Never miss a practice. Never.

  Never be ready to settle for a tie.

  Never take an easy opponent lightly.

  Never practice without a thought in mind.NANCY LOPEZ, professional golfer

  Never bet with anyone who has a deep tan,

  squinty eyes, and a one-iron in his bag.DAVE MARR, professional golfer

  The one-iron is regarded as one of the most difficult clubs to master, so a golfer who carries one—especially if he’s tanned and squinty-eyed—is likely to be skilled. About the club, Lee Trevino observed, “Not even God can hit a one-iron.” The legendary baseball executive Branch Rickey was fond of giving similar advice, but in a slightly different way: “Never play checkers with a man who carries his own board.”

  Never take shit from anybody.BILLY MARTIN, quoting his mother

  In an interview during his playing days, Martin cited this as one of the most valuable pieces of advice he got from his mother, Jenny Salvini Martin Downey. The daughter of struggling Italian immigrants who lived in West Berkeley, California, Jenny was a highly volatile and combative woman whose motto was, “Never take no shit from nobody.” Jenny’s second husband (and Billy Martin’s father) was Alfred Martin, a smooth-talking, guitar-strumming womanizer of Portuguese descent. When Jenny found out that her husband was becoming involved with a fifteen-year-old high school student, she tracked the girl down and beat her senseless. Returning home, she gathered together her husband’s clothes and threw them on the front lawn. When Alfred arrived home, the pregnant Jenny (with Billy in her womb) rushed outside and bashed in every window in his car with a hand mirror. The couple divorced before she gave birth. As Billy grew up, Jenny taught him that “Every insult must be avenged” and “To earn respect you have to use your fists.” After Martin’s playing career with the New York Yankees, he had managerial stints with five baseball clubs, most notably the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. Because of a stormy relationship with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Martin was hired and fired as team manager five separate times. As a player and manager, he had a fiery and combative style that made his mother proud.

  When badly overmatched,

  never descend to weak dejection or loss of interest.

  Play as strongly as you can and keep your self-respect.PAUL METZLER, in Advanced Tennis (1968)

  Never fake a throw during a rundown;

  you might fake out your teammates as well as the runner.JOE MORGAN, in his 1998 book Baseball for Dummies,

  written with Richard Lally

  Never look back and never look ahead.CHUCK NOLL

  Noll, who was head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1969 to 1991, took the team to four Super Bowl victories, more than any other NFL coach. He added: “The key to a winning season is focusing on one opponent at a time. Winning one week at a time.”

  Never let your head hang down.

  Never give up and sit down and grieve.

  Find another way.

  And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.LEROY “SATCHEL” PAIGE

  Buck Owen, the legendary Negro League baseball star, said in his 1997 autobiography, I Was Right On Time, that this was his favorite Satchel Paige quote. Another popular Paige quotation was, “Never do nothing till your muscles are loosed up.”

  Never try a shot you haven’t practiced.HARVEY PENICK

  After serving as the golf coach at the University of Texas for more than three decades, Penick became a favorite trainer of golfers on the PGA and LPGA tour. In 1992, he wrote (with Bud Shrake) Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, one of the most popular golf books ever written. Among the numerous tips he offered on the mental game of golf was this:

  Never—I repeat, never—allow yourself to think about

  what is riding on a putt.

  Never forget that it’s imperative to keep people positive,

  because those who are discontented have the potential to infect others.RICK PITINO, in Success Is a Choice (1997)

  Never surrender opportunity for security.BRANCH RICKEY, his motto

  After a successful career as manager and general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, Rickey became general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942. He is now best remembered as the man who broke major league baseball’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to a contract in 1946 and starting him in a game in 1947.

  Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.GEORGE HERMAN “BABE” RUTH

  Never let the failure of your last pitch affect the success of your next one.NOLAN RYAN, in Nolan Ryan’s Pitcher’s Bible (1991),

  written with Tom House

  Never criticize a player in public.DEAN SMITH

  Smith, coach of the University of North Carolina Tarheels for thirty-six years, tried to inspire his players by posting a “Thought of the Day” in the team’s locker room. In A Coach’s Life: My Forty Years in College Basketball, (1999), he wrote this about a saying discussed in the “Classic Neverisms” chapter:

  I genuinely believe in one of our Thoughts of the Day used by our team:

  “Never judge your neighbor until

  you have walked in his moccasins for two full moons.”

  Smith also offered these two other thoughts:

  Only praise behavior you want to be repeated.

  Never use false praise.

  Never let anyone play harder than you.

  That is the part of the game you can control.

  No matter what happens— never give up a hole .SAM SNEAD, in The Education of a Golfer (1962)

  Snead finished this thought by saying: “In tossing in your cards after a bad beginning you also undermine your whole game, because to quit between tee and green is more habit-forming than drinking a highball before breakfast.” With his trademark straw hat and folksy demeanor, Snead appeared to have a casual approach to the game. It would, however, be hard to name a professional golfer with a more competitive spirit. In his career, he won a record eighty-two PGA Tour events, including seven “majors.” His competitive spirit also showed up in these thoughts:

  Never let up.

  The more you can win by, the more doubts

  you put in the other players’ minds the next time out.

  Keep close count of your nickels and dimes,

  stay away from whiskey, and never concede a putt.

  Never room a good guy with a loser.CASEY STENGEL, quoted by Billy Martin

  Martin was in his first season as manager of the New York Yankees when Stengel offered him this advice about separating supportive players and bad apples on road trips. “When you make out your rooming list, always room your losers together,” he advised. He added, “Those losers who stay together will blame the manager for everything, but it won’t spread if you keep them isolated.”

  Never change a winning game;

  always change a losing one.BILL TILDEN, legendary American tennis player

  Never give a golfer an ultimatum unless you’re prepared to lose.ABIGAIL VAN BUREN, advice to wives of golfing husbands

  Never relax for a second, no matter what the score.TONY WILDING, legendary New Zealand tennis player

  Wilding, the Wimbledon champ from 1910 to 1913, added: “The body will usually respond if you have the willpower, pluck, and determination to spur yourself to fresh efforts.”

  Never swing at a ball you’re fooled on or have trouble hitting.TED WILLIAMS, quoted in a 1954 issue of Sport magazine

  In his “advice to young batters,” Williams also said: “Hit only strikes” and “After two strikes . . . shorten up on the bat and try to put the head of the bat on the ball.”

  Never complain about the officiating. It does no good.

  During the game I don’t want to be fighting two opponents.JOHN WOODEN

 
When he died at age ninety-nine in 2010, Wooden was history’s most successful college basketball coach. Wooden’s impressive career was described at the beginning of the chapter and it seems fitting to bring the chapter to a close with some of his other favorite neverisms:

  Never lose your temper.

  Never discourage ambition.

  Never be out-fought or out-hustled.

  Never mistake activity for achievement.

  Never let your emotions overrule your head.

  Never allow anyone else to define your success.

  Never believe you’re better than anybody else,

  but remember that you’re just as good as everybody else.

  (his father’s favorite saying)

  Don’t worry about being better than someone else,

  but never cease trying to be the best that you can become.

  twelve

  Never Get Caught in Bed with a Live Man or a Dead Woman

  Politics & Government

  Shortly after Richard M. Nixon’s death on April 22, 1994, family members began going through the former president’s effects in his Park Ridge, New Jersey, home. When they opened the center drawer of the desk in his home office, they discovered a laminated piece of paper that began with these words:A President needs a global view, a sense of proportion and a keen sense of the possible. He needs to know how power operates and he must have the will to use it. If I could carve ten rules into the wall of the Oval Office for my successors in the dangerous years just ahead, they would be these.

  What followed were ten rules that have come to be known as “Richard Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft.” Five were expressed neveristically:

  Never be belligerent, but always be firm.

  Never seek publicity that would destroy the ability to get results.

  Never give up unilaterally what could be used as a bargaining chip.

  Never let your adversary underestimate

  what you would do in response to a challenge.

  Never lose faith.

  Faith without strength is futile, but strength without faith is sterile.

  Nixon wasn’t the first U.S. president to be intrigued by the idea of compiling a list of ten guiding principles or ethical imperatives. As a student of history, he was certainly familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to do the very same thing. Jefferson worked on his project over the course of many years, tinkering with the items on his list as he got new ideas from his reading of ancient Greek thinkers, like Epictetus, or more contemporary European writers. He eventually pared his list down to ten, which he called his “Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life.” Here are the first three:

  Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.

  Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

  Never spend your money before you have it.

  Some of the items in the Decalogue were copied directly from other sources (like that first one, from Lord Chesterfield), while others appeared to be his own creation. Jefferson viewed the sayings as an important set of moral and ethical guidelines, and he recommended them to family members and friends as well.

  While people from every walk of life have formulated rules of life, politicians have especially favored the approach. In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged for the purchase of Alaska from Czar Alexander II of the Russian Empire. The acquisition, which added nearly 600,000 square miles to the territory of the United States, cost the U.S. Treasury $7.2 million (about 1.9 cents per acre). It is now considered one of history’s shrewdest real estate deals, but at the time many American newspaper editorials described Alaska as “a frozen wilderness” and decried the purchase as “Seward’s Folly.” Seward was unruffled by the intense criticism, though, and forged ahead resolutely until the deal was done. After his retirement, he was asked by a friend why he did not respond to the vicious attacks. His reply was immortalized in a 1910 New York Times article titled, “Mottoes That Have Guided Prominent Men to Success”:

  Early in my life I made it a rule

  never to reply to personal criticisms,

  never to defend myself from political attacks.

  Seward said he was inspired by a quotation originally authored by the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “Never complain, never explain.” About Disraeli’s saying, which we discussed in the classic neverisms chapter, he said:

  That rule I have followed faithfully.

  I never complain and I never explain,

  and I feel that my adherence to this rule has made me what I am.

  Many U.S. presidents have cited neveristic rules of life and conduct. After he retired, Martin van Buren was asked what rule he had found most important in all his years of political life. He almost instantly replied:

  It is a very simple rule. You can put it in three words:

  “Never write letters.”

  When politicians put things in writing, he explained, the documents have a way of coming back to haunt them. To guard against the possibility of leaving potentially damaging evidence behind, Van Buren conducted almost all of his political affairs in private conversations. He added: “I would rather travel a hundred miles by stagecoach or packetboat than write one political letter.”

  While not putting things in writing has been preferred by many politicians, there are even more subtle methods of conducting political affairs. Some classic ones were articulated by a Boston politician named Martin M. Lomasney, who said:

  Never write if you can speak;

  never speak if you can nod;

  never nod if you can wink.

  In the early 1900s, Lomasney was the most powerful politician in Boston, often called “The Czar of Ward Eight” and “The Boston Mahatma.” He didn’t like the description of “political boss,” though, once saying: “A boss gives orders. I don’t. When I want something done, I ask for it. Just before the election we send out suggestions to the voters. We don’t tell ’em how to vote. We just suggest.”

  Nearly a half century after Lomasney offered his three neveristic rules, a similar thought was attributed to Earl Long, the younger brother of Huey Long, Jr. Older brother Huey served one term as governor of Louisiana in the 1920s, and Earl was elected to the first of three nonconsecutive terms in 1939. As governor, Earl said:

  Never put anything in writing

  that you can convey by a wink or a nod.

  And when he was serving as the attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer updated these legendary rules of political life:

  Never talk when you can nod.

  And never write when you can talk.

  My only addendum is never put it in an e-mail.

  In addition to formulating rules of life for themselves, politicians have also employed them as weapons against their opponents. In 1933, after Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in the presidential election, leaders of the Republican Party attempted to blame the Great Depression on the Democrats. The attempt failed—largely because the Wall Street crash occurred four years earlier, when Hoover was president. But FDR didn’t just sit idly by as GOP leaders made the charge. In a 1933 speech, he said he had rubbed his eyes in disbelief after reading that a Republican leader said, “It was not a Republican depression but a Democratic depression.” He added:

  Now, there is an old and somewhat lugubrious adage that says:

  “Never speak of rope in the house of a man who has been hanged.”

  In the same way, if I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience,

  the last word in the whole dictionary

  that I think I would use is that word “depression.”

  In the rest of the chapter, we’ll continue our look at political neverisms. As in preceding chapters, I will provide commentary about many of the quotations in an attempt to enhance your enjoyment or deepen your appreciation of them.

  Never answer a hypothetical question.MOSHE ARENS

  Arens was Israel’s minister of defense whe
n he offered this thought in the early 1980s. The saying has been repeated by scores of politicians—including at least three U.S. presidents—and is now routinely described as a cardinal rule of politics.

  Never let the other fellow set the agenda.JAMES BAKER, his rule for a negotiation

  As secretary of state during the Reagan administration, Baker was on a diplomatic mission in England when London’s Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying this in 1988.

  Never display agony in public in an opinion.HUGO L. BLACK, to Harry Blackmun

  Black said this to fellow jurist Blackmun in 1970, shortly after Blackmun had been sworn in as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Black added: “Never say that this is an agonizing, difficult decision. Always write it as though it’s as clear as crystal.”

  Never offend people with style

  when you can offend them with substance.SAM W. BROWN JR.

  In 1968, Brown was head of the student campaign for Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator who was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. When McCarthy challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, his campaign attracted legions of enthusiastic college students, far-left radicals, and other countercultural types. One of the great triumphs of the campaign was its success in getting many scruffy-looking supporters to shave their beards and dress more conventionally. The never offend people with style saying, with its lovely ironic touch, captured the thinking behind the “Get Clean for Gene” motto. I recently queried Brown about his now-famous saying, and in his reply to me, he said, “By acting on the dictum we actually changed the country.” He also added in his note:It always struck me as downright stupid to ask people to overcome their negative first impression before you could talk to them about important issues. And in the sixties it was pretty easy to offend what was still a very culturally conservative country. So, by the simple expedient of dressing in a more conventional way and not showing up on a doorstep reeking of pot, you had a better chance to engage people in a real discussion about the war, or civil rights, than if they were put off by your appearance.