A supermodel needed to be able to be on ‘Sports Illustrated,’ to be able to walk runways, to be able to do beauty ads, to be on covers. And the girls now can no longer be on covers and be in the ads because your actresses have taken over all the jobs. I don’t know what happened, but we want our jobs back.
Let’s face it. There is no setup in Pakistan to train and groom young players at the grassroots level in different sports. Those of us who did make a name for ourselves and became champions did it with our own initiative – there was no academy to back us till we reached a certain level on our own.
I love eating it – grilled chicken, pasta, rice, and other foods that give me long term energy. Every once in a while, my sweet tooth gets the best of me and I have to snack on some candy. Beverage wise, I stick to sports drinks, water, milk, and juice.
I’m apparently attracted to things that are on the edge of what America really wants to watch: ‘Six Feet Under,’ ‘Sports Night,’ ‘Dirty Sexy Money,’ and ‘Parenthood’ were always struggling in the ratings. It was kind of heartbreaking not knowing if we get to come back every season.
I am not only an athlete and sports entertainer, but also have a huge passion for fitness, beauty and fashion, so I am open to many different types of brands. When it comes to brands approaching me, I just need them to be very specific, to the point of what they want and need from me.
The BBC sports department when I was there was seriously to the right of Ghengis Khan, and if people think I am strange, they should have met some of the production staff I worked with. Margaret Thatcher and the Queen were the pin up girls for many of them.
I’ve always been a fan of football, always watched the NFL and it’s great to always sit back wherever I can this year. You sit back and enjoy the games, pop a little sports drink – not any pop or soda – lay back, watch the games. It’s always cool to see how the games go down and just enjoy them.
I still feel that in India we look upon sports as a recreational activity – which it is – but people have to understand that there is a career in sports. It’s not just necessary to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, as most of us Indians appear to think that our children should grow up to be.
One afternoon when I was 9, my dad told me I’d be skipping school the next day. Then we drove 12 hours from Melbourne to Sydney for the Centenary Test, a once-in-a-lifetime commemorative cricket match. It was great fun – especially for a kid who was a massive sports fan.
I get the ‘The New York Times’ and ‘Los Angeles Times’ thrown at my door every morning. I’ll read the front page of ‘The New York Times,’ then the op-eds, then scan the arts section and then the sports section. Then I do the same with the ‘L.A. Times.’
I started wrestling at ten. I played a lot of other sports: soccer, football. I really enjoyed skiing. But wrestling just took off for me. It seemed to be the sport I had an affinity for; I liked the individual, combative nature. There’s something special about that. It took me all the places I wanted to go.
I gave birth to my first son in April 1986. I thought it would be a good goal to get back in shape after having a baby if I ran the New York City Marathon. I ran in it November 1986. I had just shot the ‘Sports Illustrated’ swimsuit issue, so I was in great shape.
The only reason professional sports teams – I shouldn’t say the only reason, but the most important reason professional sports teams exist – is to win. And if you’re not aiming to win, then you really don’t belong owning a sports team, in my opinion. So you’ve got to be moving there.
Sports teaches you there is always a second innings in life. If you fail today, there’s a second innings maybe two days later. Maybe there’s another opportunity coming up three or six months later. If you look at mistake as learnings and commit never to make a same mistake again, then you actually get better with every mistake that you make.
Like a lot of people, I pray for a sick relative or that kind of thing, but I don’t pray to make my next flight connection at the airport. I find prayers before sports contests to be insensitive and kind of demeaning, at least when someone prays to beat the other team or something like that.
I’m a pretty agile guy, especially being taller and having done martial arts from about the age of 13, but parkour is one of those sports that I wish I’d discovered sooner. When my nephew first showed me, I thought, ‘Damn – I’m too old for this.’
Building a sports power is a patriotic undertaking aimed at translating into reality the plan and wish of the great leaders, who devoted their efforts to building ours into a country that prospers and grows stronger on the strength of sports.
Everyone has to try to give back as much as possible because I think in all sports it helps kids to have role models or people to look up to. Someone like Jess Ennis, I know a lot of young girls have started to get into athletics stuff because of her, because of her success.
If you work hard in real life, people tend to get in your way – either from inertia or prejudice – and they stop you achieving things. It’s the worst thing about real life compared with sports, where you generally get what you deserve: if you’re the fastest guy, you win; there are no other games being played.
At Reliance Foundation schools, we lay special emphasis on value-based education, sports, and overall development of students. That is why the teacher-students ratio is kept at a healthy 1:20 so that all children get proper attention in class.
My parents wanted me and my siblings to practice some sports outside school. And since we lived next to a tennis club, we decided to play tennis. I didn’t have an idol, so to speak, but I always enjoyed watching Pete Sampras and Alex Corretja.
Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.
What we have seen is that sports is definitely developing in India. I can see a lot of positive things happening in India. It may take a bit more time, but with proper guidance and people having passion for sports, I don’t think we are far away from becoming a good sporting nation.
Our parents gave us an opportunity to play sports but never really forced us to play. I actually – when I turned 11, decided, you know, I just didn’t like playing baseball the year before and, you know, I didn’t want to play. And they actually said, hey, if you didn’t want to play, take the year off, you know, go enjoy time with your friends.
You always hear that tragedies put sports in perspective, that they prove we shouldn’t care this much about the successes and failures of a bunch of wealthy strangers. I’m going the other way – sometimes, sports put everything else in perspective.
