Black and Blue Review
Rivera on Ditka:
“He did impact me in a very special way. I get excited every time I see him. There’s not a lot of people I’m nervous around, but when you’re around him, you still never want to disappoint him.”
“He has presence. One of Mr. Richardson’s favorite things to talk about is presence, and coach Ditka has that. He walks in the room, people know who he is. People know he’s a winner. And that’s what you want to be able to exude. You want people to understand and say ‘This guy’s a winner, he knows what it takes.'”
“I don’t like to be demonstrative in front of a lot of people and he was never really like that unless it was really that bad. But he would pull you aside and he’d give you a word, a quiet word, a confident word. But he would do it away from everybody so nobody really saw him correcting or encouraging. I think that’s important because you don’t want to blow everybody up in front of a whole bunch of people.”
“He never expected us to do anything that he couldn’t do, but remember, he was a Hall of Famer, so his standard was very, very high. And that’s one of the things that we’ve got to get across. We’ve got to understand that the standard has to be very, very high.”
Ditka on Rivera as a player:
“When he came to us out of Cal, we knew what we had. We knew we had a good football player, but we had a smart football player. We knew we had a guy who could be in control of the defense, put the other people in place, tell them what they had to do, and he did that to a lot of our guys. Not like we had a bunch of dummies. Sometimes it got a little technical because Buddy’s system wasn’t the easiest system in the world.”
Ditka on Rivera as a coach:
“He’s going to bring you a championship.”
Ditka on early coaching career:
“I didn’t care about the money, all I cared about was the opportunity. All I cared about was having a chance.”
Ditka on life:
“If you have a good attitude about life, if you’re positive, you can achieve anything. If you’re negative, you’ll achieve nothing. And besides that, you’ll be a pain in the ass to be around.”