The only crystal ball even more difficult to read than where one's own personal situation may be is where the country is headed and what the country's economic situation will be in 20 or 30 years.

The players need to look at themselves and stand up and be counted. Some people aren't playing to their maximum potential. Unfortunately some of them don't see it like that. Some of them aren't earning their money.

The poets of the present day who would raise the epic song cry out, like Archimedes of old, 'give us a place to stand on and we will move the world.' This is, as we conceive, the true difficulty.

The point of the book was to give fans an inside look at what a general manager does, in terms of personal interaction, in terms of trade-making, in terms of issues that general managers deal with. In this case, I thought I had an opportunity, with literary license, to show a very human side of him. If his point is, 'OK, John, that was a private conversation and I would prefer that you keep it that way,' I understand that.

The people who came in told us such amazing stories of their personal journeys, how they got to Madison, that we just threw out the scripts. What these people are talking about in their native tongues are their own personal experiences.