An agent won't help you get drafted higher, won't make you win more games, and won't make you faster or stronger. They all say they can, but the people who do the drafting don't talk to agents. They talk to coaches, they watch film, they talk to the people who've worked with players. They don't talk to agents.
But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
Managing can be more discouraging than playing, especially when you're losing because when you're a player, there are at least individual goals you can shoot for. When you're a manager all the worries of the team become your worries.
It's always really challenging trying to go from player to player/coach. You have a kind of friendship basis of relationship with all of your teammates and now you go to this power position where you have to make decisions that might hurt people's feelings.
The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
I'd say handling people is the most important thing you can do as a coach. I've found every time I've gotten into trouble with a player, it's because I wasn't talking to him enough.
I was never great, but I was a good [basketball] player, and I could play seriously. Now I'm like one of these old guys who's running around, and the guys I play with, who are all a lot younger, they sort of pity me and sympathize with me. They tolerate me, but we all know that I'm the weak link on the court. And I don't like being the weak link.
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
I have to be involved in negotiations because players have to buy into me and what I want from them if they join my club, so all managers need to be fully involved in transfers, that's for sure.