YouSaid · the spoken record

John Amaechi

lines on the record: 75
first: 2025-10-01
most recent: 2025-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's an excellent question. I used to say that I wanted to be in the House of Lords. I think politics is beneath me now. I think I want to find a way to have a broader impact than I have, a broader positive impact than I currently have. I'm not quite sure how that will happen. I've been using social media, and that's only so effective. So that's my goal. If what I'm saying is not nonsense and people engage with it and they like what I write and read, I must find a way to reach more people.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing I love about my approach is simply that there's no gatekeeping here. There's not a certain school or a certain accent or a certain language. You can choose to be an excellent leader of people, to be the kind of person people wish to follow if you're willing to put in the work and earn some new skills, and none of them are complex. They're just energy expensive.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not innate and it's not bestowed leadership is earned. It's not something that you need to understand what combination of personalities or cognitive styles you have. It's a set of skills that you need to choose to develop. Either the people around you, the people that you might lead, whether it's that two people in your family or that ten people in your community or in your team or whether that be a sports team or a business, it's just, are these people consequential enough for you to want to have the optimal possible impact on them or aren't they? And if they are, then there are some behaviors that you can choose about your presence and about your eloquence that you can choose these things to make you a better leader.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I again, my mind immediately went, citation, please. I don't know if that's true, but I'm an introvert, so it appeals to me. But I definitely think that if you're an introvert, speaking is so energy expensive that if you're going to do it, speaking especially in front of an audience or in front of somebody consequential, is so energy expensive if you're going to do it, you tend to plan and think it through more carefully, which can mean that your words are more carefully chosen, more carefully tonally placed. Whereas if you're an extrovert, you just like to talk. And so you might just say anything. I don't know. I haven't seen the evidence behind that, but it appeals to me.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not who we are. I love taking those Jedi tests quizzes. What kind of Jedi are you? And I managed to contrive it, so I'm always my favorite Jedi. And that's what personality tests are. Hogan and the rest of them contrive. And all they do is gatekeep because you end up with people who read these things and think, oh, extroversion is important if you can't extrovert, how are you speaking in front of people? How are you speaking in front of shareholders? That's nonsense. I'm an extreme introvert. I find human beings extraordinarily energy expensive, but worth it. And personality tests have been holding down the same groups of people for the last fifty years. We need to bin them and throw them out.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God, nonsense, utter nonsense. It is not that these factors don't exist. It's just that the constellations of these factors don't tell you who you are. Your personality is mutable. It changes moment to moment, never mind under stress versus not. You are not anybody listening to this. You are not a bloody primary color. The complexity of the human condition cannot be captured in red.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrates its idea in current psychology. Oh God, I don't know this is ridiculous that it didn't come to me early. So personality testing It's absolute bollocks It is it is you might as well throw, you might as well throw leafs into a pond and then interpret the reality from the shape they make.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is one of the reasons one of the other reasons is that I am a practical psychologist, I am interested in what psychology can do to make people's lives better. I want to help people thrive. And so for me, psychology is not theoretical. It's pragmatic. And I do have lots of colleagues who think that way too. But a lot of the very famous ones, it appears that they write For a theoretical audience rather than an audience living in a very real and rather challenging world.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whilst I am an incredibly robust scientist, I'm interested in the evidence-based process and using the best possible research, I am not interested in appearing clever to people. I'm interested in people understanding, and I think many psychologists, especially those who make their names in academia, they want to write in a way that makes what they know seem completely inaccessible, if not magic, and I want to write in a way that makes everybody know that what I know is ordinary and easily gainable if you're willing to engage in the process.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you're allowed to I have regrets that do not anchor me, right? So if you ask me, and the moment you said it, my mind did this thing where it was like on rails and I just went, I flipped all the way back and tiny, lots of tiny instances, I was like, oh, almost like little wince moments come to me. The difference is I'm not living in any of those spots. I'm not anchored. Broadly content with where I am, although I am an incredibly ambitious person and probably won't be content until I am a household name for my psychology, but I'll keep working on that in the background”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, I didn't know the man, right? But it's just if he's coming back, there are cheaper ways to have veteran talent on your team. And there are cheaper ways to have a former all-star on your team. There are just cheaper ways of having that slot filled. And I can't imagine if he was problematic, if he wasn't delivering anything in terms of wisdom, shared wisdom, shared cultural insight, something else in terms of the performance of the team. I just can't imagine they'd keep bringing him back. I could be wrong. Maybe they're dumb and they don't mind spending millions of pounds on people who don't bring anything to the table, but I doubt it.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know that. I mean, you can't criticize people for continuing to be able to be paid at the highest level by people who rate you. He was not going to be, but most people won't respect what he brings off the court, I am, I would imagine. I can't imagine he's managed to stick around on these teams being less than his kind of former self and not bringing anything else to the table. So, yeah.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh boy. One of my early memorable games happened against Washington in Washington, DC. I scored 12 points in the third and fourth quarter and we beat Washington, coming off the bench, and it was one of the first games. I was like, oh, shit, I might be quite good at this. Yeah.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's brilliant. It's really, really fun. One of them, when they obviously are subjected to my books, so they're assigned my books to read. They have no choice. And one of them, when they were reading my last book, The Promises of Giants, they were like, oh, I didn't know you played sport, but it was just like that. It had no concept of, even though I'm sure they must have known what the NBA is. It was just like, oh, I didn't know you played some sport. I was like, yeah, I played some sport. And even now, I've got clients, commercial clients. No idea. No idea at all, especially in Europe and the UK. Just no idea at all that I played. I find it gratifying, actually.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Credibility, I think there is just a part of it. You mentioned before that the monster kind of analogy, I do everything I can to help people see that I have something to offer them in this new context. And being a professor is part of that. Teaching students who know more than you. And I know lots of people say that and think it's bollocks, but it's not. They are closer to the data graduate students are closer to the science than I am. I often get informed by them newest things that are happening. My value entirely to graduate students is how do you apply what you now know theoretically to this pragmatic ever changing world, to the practicalities of all that these different businesses? And that's my value to them. So yeah, it's credibility and it's joy”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family could hear it and they just sat in silence. I was like, I'm done I remember just laughing, laughing for a car journey. I'm done. It was great. Mean I'm fat now, which is less fun, and my knees hurt But I've got a job that I'm an all-star instead of being a bench player.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now you get an opportunity to reinvent yourself, using all the skills that made you brilliant in basketball, and I mean in the mechanisms of becoming brilliant. It's not shooting and passing, but the idea of how you got so good at those things, there's an opportunity for you to reorient it. And more than that, for most players, if you've had a decent career five years or so, there's an opportunity to just rest. I laughed when I retired. I remember when I was told that I was traded to New York, I was in a car, I was in Houston, my family had come to visit me for Christmas, and I got a call from JBJ, JBG, and he had said, I'm sorry, you know, you've been traded to New York and they'll be in touch in a couple of days and let you know what's what. And I was like, I didn't say it to him, but I hung up. It was on speakerphone.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like a relief for you. I'm out of that. So, the things you miss are some of the logistical things, right? The idea of driving up to the side of a plane, leaving your keys in the car, somebody grabs your bags and put it into the back of the plane, and then they drive your car off. And then when you land, it's there again, heated up, heated seats on. That's great and can't be replaced. Private planes can't be replaced. But for the most part, there's a sense of relief with an opportunity to switch yourself from this one-dimensional being who's at the behest of the fat man in row two C.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it helps if you graduate. I think it helps if you've got a basic bachelor's in something. But all of these players can find themselves gainfully employed somewhere because they're willing to work and learn, which is the watchwords of playing professional sport. Also, more importantly than that, I should have said this first, more importantly than that, if you played professional sport, you've learned to embrace and even love mundanity. The boring, the repetitive, and if you can embrace the boring and the repetitive, there is no job you can't be good at.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you've driven yourself to be in the NBA, the chances are there are, and you've certainly, and you've managed the disappointment and you've played in Europe as well, because that's not chopped liver either, then the chances are you've got the grind and the planning skills and the kind of stick to find yourself another role. It may not be the sexiest role in the world, but not everybody is going to end up on their knees, which I think is the implication lots of people think that athletes like that will.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just what I try and do is to help them to understand that any role, any job anywhere where your occupation is your definition will lead you to harm. And basketball is one of the most intoxicating things for that. You are not you don't just play basketball, you're a basketballer, you don't just do the sport and shoot the shots, you're a shooter. And my thing is I never was a basketball player. I just played basketball. And that distinction helped give me distance enough to know that there was a life when I was 35 years old that would have to be lived for some time, hopefully, where basketball wouldn't be a feature in it, at least not playing. And that's what I did. That's what I tell the young people now I talk to. Go for it. Commit to it, make a plan, drive your body, recuperate sensibly, and go for it. But remember”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had two surgical procedures this year. You cannot be three hundred fifty pounds and play three or four times a week for an entire season and imagine that it's anything than dumb luck that you don't get seriously hurt. And the consequences for your body, I can tell you, are profound. I have had two what are they called that women have when they are pregnant it's the injection that's anaesthetic I forget what it's called now but people listening will know if they've had if their partners have had children or they've had children and I've had two of those this year which is unbelievable right just so I can walk so yeah people get hurt because you play three or four games a week and if you care about the players so much then demand less games a week.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never had any, I definitely couldn't have been a coach because I never had any leanings when it came to that either way. It always felt to me like at the beginning of the year when officials explained the new rule changes. I was like, I don't know what problem you're trying to solve, but okay, that tended to be my approach. And so even now, I look at the game and I respect it for its evolution. But I'm not one of those players. I know that there are some and they are better players than I who talk about how the games change and it's no good anymore because people just shoot threes and whatever else. But I do remember similar critique of the grind days when people would just mash the crap out of each other and the scores would be in the 70s. The league simply tries to respond to what people want and then people change their mind about what they want.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I'm an NBA ambassador, so I don't have any choice. And again, it's not because I hate basketball, it's just, you know, I could eat cake and read a book instead. And that's my preference nowadays. So I've got access, all the former players got access to the NBA league pass. So what I tend to do is watch the condensed games to keep me up to date. I haven't watched any of the Summer League except for some clips on TikTok”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, God, I don't remember. I just remember seeing the law pass and thinking, how can I be in a place where the people who do everything for us can't get to work without being intimidated by the authorities?”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I lived in Arizona, I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I loved it there for so many reasons, but found it confusing. Because it was the first place that I realized that you could hate people, that you couldn't live without. It was the first place that I went when I realized that this swathe of the population that might be undocumented or might be first generation immigrants from Spanish speaking Latin places could both be derided as the cause of all pain and yet be the backbone of an economy. It was a remarkable experience to watch it happening. I left Arizona because of SB ten seventy, the state law that said If you look brown they can stop and ask you for your papers I left the state, I left the states then.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Food. Food, it always quite annoys me. I go to America and people are like, oh, your food is just stodgy, terrible. And listen, there is stodgy food that I would consider terrible, right? There's lots of, I live in just the city, the east end of, not quite the east end of London. And there's food here like eels in what they call liquor, which is this green sauce. It's not my cup of tea, right? So this food, I think, is bad, but this place is a product of our colonial past. And as such, there is unbelievably good food from everywhere in the world on your doorstep. I ate vegan Korean food yesterday, and it was amazing, and the day before it was Malay and the day before it was fish and chips. I have that option every day.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, our politicians are grifters who don't have a decent policy idea to rub together for what they do know is that they can tell you that the reason for your pain is not your fault, the reason for your loss is not your fault, the reason for your condition is not your fault, it's the fault of that person over there. And that's what leads to a society that people think is crumbling. The selective use of video right now, you go online and you can see these examples of London is almost burning, right? But London isn't burning. Crime has been dropping in London for the last decade. So the reality of the situation doesn't match the fervor of people's rhetoric. So no wonder people think the place is falling to pieces because powerful people with vested interests love to tell you that it is.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you do, what does that say about you as a human being? It's like there's no time in the past that was good. It wasn't better. And if you do think it's better, the only way that's true is if you're part of the aristocracy. And I don't mean if you're rich now, I mean you're part of the aristocracy, because if you weren't, if you aren't part of the aristocracy now, you go back a couple of generations and you're working for somebody in the most abhorrent conditions imaginable.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that is a fundamental delusion of our time right now. Everybody harkens back to a period of time that they believe is somehow better in a numerous if not always, and these every generation, there's really good research on this. Every generation has a sense that there was a period of time that was right. Every generation has a period has a sense that there has been a moral and substantively principled decline in society. And it's never borne out in reality. It's never borne out in reality. All of this make America great stuff. All of this make Britain great again. All of this give me my country back as we're experiencing in Britain at the moment. Who's us that wants a country back and what era do you want? Do you want the era when men died at thirty six of black lung? Do you want this?”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there could be that too, in which case I'll probably miss it because I'll be in my house. But it strikes me that Peak London was like the 60s. You know, prior to the vociferous racism of the 70s and just after the kind of introduction of mind-altering drugs that expanded people's horizons a little bit. I think there was something about that time in terms of music and art that was really fascinating. It's not my era and I don't know it well, but it just strikes me that that was an era.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it is not true. What is true is that the connector there, or when you look at the data, the factor that is most predictive of homophobia is religiosity. And because many African American communities are also more highly religious, it is the religious element of that, not the skin color or ethnicity that determines the homophobia. It is also true to say that when you look at it in the United Kingdom and you look at black, Caribbean, black, African communities, very often their homophobia comes from imperial colonialism. It comes from the fact that the British brought homophobic rules to those glands, and ironically we now then criticize those places for holding on to the same rules that we imposed on them hundred years ago.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was plenty of vociferous homophobia, but our lies were less connected in Europe This is not to say I didn't really like my teammates, but in the NBA you are just with each other relentlessly and yet in Europe there are national team breaks and there's only one or two games a week, so there's just more time to be away from your team and away from each other's company and so you get to know your team much less well unless you are overtly invited to someone else's house You live separate lives and then you come together twice a week for games and three times a week for practice but other than that you don't see each other”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they just looked at me, and anything that I did, I remember I wore this t shirt, which is from a famous advert in the United Kingdom, Wallace and Gromit, right? Yeah, you've got the program here now. But Wallace and Gromit, and I wore this grommet t-shirt, and it had some ridiculous words on it, right? But it's very cutesy and definitely not what athletes were at the time. And people were, I heard people like, yeah, yeah, well, you know, he's British. And that happened all the time for stuff. So I think part of the reason I skated through my college experience, although many people now tell me they knew I was gay, I can't tell whether they knew or they're just saying it now. But I think it was that confusion for people'cause they heard my voice and saw my face and that didn't make sense anyway. They thought I had people who were like all British people are white and so it was central Pennsylvania in the nineties.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had the ultimate advantage. I didn't realize this early on, but I had the ultimate advantage in that Americans at that time didn't seem to be able to distinguish between somebody being British and somebody being gay. And so”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would encourage people to have a more nuanced view of being in the closet, right? So just because you don't know doesn't mean that they're in the closet. So I'm in an interesting position now where I'm at once incredibly well known to be gay by certain people, but there's a whole generation of people who have no idea of it, and there's a whole context with my work who don't necessarily know either. But just because there's some people who don't know doesn't mean I'm not out, I have a partner, we go out. And so it's a known thing. There are players right now who are out in the same way I am. Some of their colleagues, some of their teammates, some of their administrative staff, and some of their friends and some of their family will know that they're gay, but they simply haven't announced it on the jumbotron.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really well. There were a number of players who knew, because I told them, because they asked, because for the most part, with one exception, when people asked me I told them. And so a number of them knew, and it was very much a shrug and not a big deal, and they treated me with kindness, but I also had experiences of people I cared about deeply as colleagues, as teammates, saying off hand comments that I knew they didn't mean because I'd talk to them in the locker room, but were part of the ritual of masculinity, which is diminishing women, diminishing gay people, making fun of, I don't know, those gay characters off in living colour and things like that that were hurtful, even as I knew they weren't aimed at me.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What men do is important to other men, and indeed my understanding of straight men is that most of what straight men do is in order to attract the attention of other straight men. And so when they look at the league, they're really interested in making sure that everybody there is appropriately heterosexual. It must be confusing for them now because the league is still very heterosexual, but fashion and other things mean that the league slips in its queerness every once in a while. Why are there not more? Because the consequences of being queer in American society are still profound. They're profound in a small town in Texas, and they're profound. So there's really practical reasons not to be out in America, in a country that seems to want queer people to go the way of the dodo.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the Women's League is not, the W is not a good comparison because. Don't believe this myself, but we must be honest and say that many men do not care about women. And I don't mean men don't care about women's sports, I meant what I said. Many men don't care about women, and so what women do bisexual, lesbian, whatever else, is immaterial to them. There are men there who couldn't play in a rec league who think they can beat WNBA players, and so they don't care about it. So what they do is inconsequential.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't play with Vernon. I knew him then, or I knew of him then. People called him crazy. I'm a psychologist. I'm not much into people calling people crazy, but... People call them crazy, and I. I think sometimes people mistake intensity for crazy, and he was incredibly intense and not always as self regulated as I might think is appropriate You couldn't fault him as a person who wanted to win. I mean, just must win.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, that's what you do as a veteran. I remember him giving me advice about not buying too many clothes, not too many suits, because you have to pay tax and you need to keep hold of some money. He was a good man. He was a good man.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michael Cage, I don't know if you love the game. I just know he is awesome. Shoulders is awesome. That man Oh my goodness He was a he was what they used to call a veteran's veteran right If you needed sage advice, he had it, and not just about sport. I remember me and Bobby Sura that were rookies at the same time in Cleveland. Bobby Sura was very, very good. I was not. And Bobby came in with a new car. And then the next day came in with another new car. Michael Cage followed us in. I was in a green Cherokee Laredo that I'd had for years and years and years. And he followed us into the underground car park. This is before practice. And he just said, is that a new car? He said, give me the keys. That man took Bobby and the car back to the car sales place and made them take it back.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not loving the game, and also don't be fooled if you think in Britain there's this habit of athletes kissing the badge, you know that in football they've got the badge on their shirt and they fools you into thinking that this person loves the game if them jumping into the stands and hugging you fools you into thinking that they love the game”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, so I know all former players are called legends, whether you are crap like me or brilliant like Akeemilage on, right? So I'm part of this group of legends and I'm an NBA ambassador as well. So I go around all the time with real proper legends. And a number of them I know, and so I'm not going to throw them under the bus, but it's the way we talk candidly in the van going between events. It's like, yeah, this is a job now, and it was a job then. And it was a job that wrecked our knees, destroyed our backs, made it so it's hard for us to pick up our children. And so it's a job. And we were commodities for teams, who often, at least back in those days, treated you like commodities. So yeah, there's a lot of superstars really, really excellent players, but that's the problem.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a hard question to answer because Let me give a number first, otherwise, it's just frustrating 40%. And a further 30% like the game, and 20% of them are really good at the game and they have other things they want to do with the opportunities that playing well in the NBA grants them. But make no mistake, even that 30% that likes the game and the 40% that love the game They also know that they like what the game can give them and the opportunities it can grow for them, their families, and generations. They can make a generational change in their families' life and opportunities. Not just about love. Love doesn't make you good at something, and this is a mistake that people make all the time. Loving something doesn't make you better. It just makes the hard stuff easier.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jerry would punish us to run endless sprints, and these two guys say, you guys just sit out. And they would sit out. But Carl, I remember looking up during sprints once and seeing John Stockton reading USA today as we were just slugging up and down the court. And I looked over, and Carl had demanded that one of the trainers bring him a bike. And he wasn't just kind of keeping warm, he was leathering it on the sidelines, and I just thought how remarkable best player on the team. Best player perhaps in the history of Utah basketball. And there he is, at thirty odd years old, which was old for a basketball player. At thirty odd years old, leathering it on the side while we slog on the court.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, huge amounts. Huge amounts, especially from Kahl. He was a surprisingly funny, kind driven, ambitious athlete. I didn't know him off the floor. Around the game, that's who he was. We were often punished for our performance if it was non-optimal. And because John and Carl were older in the context of athletes.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that he's beloved, right? I know that he's beloved in Utah, and I am certainly not. That man called me names Make your toes curled. I was called upperty on regular occasions. I was treated as if my studying for a doctor was a betrayal. Of basketball, this coming from the man who had not touched a basketball till he was seventeen and in six years from not touching a basketball was starting in the NBA. No other player has done that. I came to America while my mum was dying of cancer in Britain, and then this man is calling me the C word and questioning my commitment?”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need therapy. You need people to talk to or coaching in a kind of mental performance and mental health sense. You need somebody you can talk to about the nature of your feelings, the depths of anger. Imagine knowing the exact number that is your annual salary spreading out over seven years and watching it disappear in front of you despite the fact that you knew it was a principal decision. And that's where I sat with it, and I'd sat very much alone with it. The team did not have therapists and psychologists as they do now, and I sat alone with that, and it really even as I was, by the way, I was studying for my doctor as I played, but it didn't make any difference. The stuff I was learning theoretically just didn't seem to help me personally.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, free throw shooting, shooting jump shots. It was amazing. There were days when I just couldn't hit the side of a barn. And that's going from a person who was really efficient in my earlier year with Orlando. And again, the team dynamic had shifted and changed too. But yeah, I wasn't a great player at the end of that season. I was a very average, average player at the end of that season. And I'm not surprised that they went with younger, better talent. I don't obviate them of their part in why I felt that anguish. But yeah, I probably would have dropped me too.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source