Some of us have been told what we want our whole lives. We’ve been told we should want to go out for sports or not. We should want a college education or a graduate degree or a particular career. We should want to date this person and not the other.
I’ve got some great stuff in my sports memorabilia collection. But my favorite thing by far is the robe. I actually have a Ric Flair robe with ‘the Nature Boy’ on the back. That’s awesome. When I look at it, it brings back so many memories of my childhood and my teen years.
I was brought up to believe that it’s family first. Of all the people my parents knew, the family was most important. You always turn to your family, and the family supports you. We do what we can to support our young and go and see the grandchildren if they’re doing plays at school and their sports events.
My parents were both very frugal, and I think they’re responsible for my attitude of always looking for good value, especially in my work. In a way, sports betting is like a big game of ‘The Price Is Right:’ just like I’d pay $3 for a Coke Zero but not $4, I’d lay three points on the Bears-Packers point spread but not four.
Now, I know you expected me to say that, well, I just kick back in the rocking chair, fished a little bit, listened to Willie Nelson tapes and watched old baseball games on the Classic Sports network. And, tell you the truth, I have done that for maybe about five total minutes.
You get into comedy because you are insecure, and you communicate with the world through comedy to sort of alleviate the tension of those insecurities and to find a way to make people like you other than the way you look or how good you are at sports. I don’t think that really goes away.
Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports. It’s ironic because millions of people who swim as their regular exercise love the meditation aspect of it; you don’t wind up with any orthopedic injuries. But when you swim at a world class level for hours and hours – the loneness of the long distance runner.
I majored in sports and went to law school and focused in sports law, so I always knew I wanted to do ESPN but thought it would be behind the camera. After doing ‘Bachelor’ and ‘Bachelorette,’ the media circuit, I thought, you know what – I want to talk about it!
We could not be more proud to have LeBron James as part of our Lakers family. He is an incredibly thoughtful and intelligent leader and clearly appreciates the power sports has to unite communities and inspire the world to be a better place.
When I was younger, I used to bite my nails so bad. I used to play sports; I played, like, every sport. I would be playing soccer, and I’d be in the middle of the field just zoned out, biting my nails, and I’d, like, miss the ball going past me.
To me, acting used to be just, ‘Get my face out there, get girls, make a little bit of money, make my mom proud.’ It was just like sports. But there were moments in ‘Moonlight’ that I really felt like I had to know why he is the way he is. Or just people in general – why this person walks around with a frown on their face instead of a smile.
I had no interest in sports so I didn’t make friends in that traditional way where kids are in public school and they go and they join clubs, and play sports. So I kind of had to find my own way to make friends and get attention and so I just was the class clown.
When I finally discovered the ‘Sports Illustrated’ swimsuit issue, I browsed through archives and saw a picture of an incredibly stunning model, Damaris Lewis. Her images inspired me, and I imagined being in the magazine myself. Never in a million years did I dream it would actually happen.
We are raising today’s children in sterile, risk-averse and highly structured environments. In so doing, we are failing to cultivate artists, pioneers and entrepreneurs, and instead cultivating a generation of children who can follow the rules in organized sports games, sit for hours in front of screens and mark bubbles on standardized tests.
We went through this month camp, learning how to bump and hit the ropes. I just fell in love with WWE and sports entertainment. It was the perfect world of the merge in sports, action, acting, and entertainment. I felt like I finally found my place.
You have to list all your special skills on a form when you get an agent. There’s fencing, stage combat, horse riding, motorbike riding, Spanish, French, German, whatever. I just ticked everything. I talk about 10 languages according to that form. I even ticked the extreme sports box.
It takes a tremendous amount of skill to be a football player. And some of these guys have enough skills to do other sports. Soccer could be one. Basketball could be another. Things where you need incredible hand-eye coordination are always options. I think a football player would be able to adapt to a lot of sports.
Growing up, if I hadn’t had sports, I don’t know where I’d be. God only knows what street corners I’d have been standing on and God only knows what I’d have been doing, but instead I played hockey and went to school and stayed out of trouble.
I’ve always made weird sounds with my mouth. I’ve always been fascinated by the sound design, what you can do with your mouth. I was the kid dancing around in third grade on the basketball court. While everyone would be playing sports, I would be jumping around.
Outside Buckingham Palace, the Royal Standard flies only when the reigning monarch is in residence. Sadly, there’s no similar flag outside The Woods Jupiter, which Tiger opened in the summer of 2015, spending a reported $8 million to make an upscale sports bar-and-restaurant in his image.
I am very hopeful that my personal success in Qatar will ignite others, especially those in the so-called non-traditional sports, to try even harder because now they can see for themselves that significant achievements can be attained. But let me stress that it takes a lot of work – in fact, very hard work – mixed with very heavy doses of patience.
Because of the standing in society, because women’s basketball does not draw the interest that major professional sports leagues or men’s college basketball draw, Geno Auriemma is never going to be recited by the sports fan at-large as the greatest coach in history.
I had talked for years about doing a restaurant with Rocky Dudum, who’s been my friend since I first came to San Francisco. Then Rocky’s son, Jeff, said he wanted to design it, so he traveled around the country to sports restaurants like Mickey Mantle’s and Michael Jordan’s, and he came up with a great concept.
My dad is the reason I actually started watching wrestling. My dad was never big into sports; we were all big into sports as kids, and he’d go to our Little League games or whatever and not really know what was going on, because he didn’t know about sports, but he knew about wrestling.
A good vacation for me is going to warm weather. Being able to go outside, in the sun, hit the beach, play outside sports. Being active outside. Going swimming, hanging by the pool, having a couple drinks, having a couple of your close buddies around, and just having a blast.
