Big Black Horse and the Cherry Tree

Make maximum friends and minimum enemies or no enemies. Be of service to as many as you can be of service to....You don't want to go out of your way to offend or upset any country. But from time to time, a situation arises where you have to advance your interest, be consistent and principled.

How does the Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernised civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3 per cent who would have the money to hire them to clean their shoe, open their motorcar doors? ... Of course there are Chinese millionaires in big cars and big houses. Is it the answer to make a few Malay millionaires with big cars and big houses? How does telling a Malay bus driver that he should support the party of his Malay director (UMNO) and the Chinese bus conductor to join another party of his Chinese director (MCA) - how does that improve the standards of the Malay bus driver and the Chinese bus conductor who are both workers in the same company?

If we delude people into believing that they are poor because there are no Malay rights or because opposition members oppose Malay rights, where are we going to end up? You let people in the kampongs believe that they are poor because we don't speak Malay, because the government does not write in Malay, so he expects a miracle to take place in 1967 (the year Malay would become the national and sole official language). The moment we all start speaking Malay, he is going to have an uplift in the standard of living, and if doesn't happen, what happens then?

Meanwhile, whenever there is a failure of economic, social and educational policies, you come back and say, oh, these wicked Chinese, Indian and others opposing Malay rights. They don't oppose Malay rights. They, the Malay, have the right as Malaysian citizens to go up to the level of training and education that the more competitive societies, the non-Malay society, has produced. That is what must be done, isn't it? Not to feed them with this obscurantist doctrine that all they have got to do is to get Malay rights for the few special Malays and their problem has been resolved.

His speech centered on respect. Not respect from opponents, or from teammates, both of which he considered fleeting. But self-respect, earned only by potential realized.

Ryan ended with the story of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who went to Mexico in 1519 and, despite being outnumbered, ordered his charges to burn the boats they had arrived on. As Ryan reached the climax of the story, his voice boomed.

“They burned their boats!” he shouted. “I’m only asking you to give me seven weeks!”

All the separate elements of Ryan’s speeches are augmented by what players called his most important speaking quality: authenticity. Pryce described that as the main difference between Ryan and other coaches. After 14 seasons, Pryce said: “All you need is to hear a coach once to know he’s a fraud, to know he’s never been in a fistfight in his life. I heard Rex once, and I knew he would fight for me, that day.”