Eric Cantona Quotes

I always thought that there was going to be life after baseball, and so I designed that in my life I would have other interests after baseball that I would be able to step into. And I didn't realize the grip that baseball had on me and on my family.

I'm not an educated woman. What am I gonna do for the rest of my life? I'm an athlete... And now I have absolutely nothing.

People don't understand, and I do, is what happens after wrestling. What do you do when people stop chanting your name? For me, I already had that with the nightclub business before wrestling and now with DDP YOGA.

It's hard to transition out of football. Even when you're super successful, guys who have played 18 or 20 years and have won four Super Bowls, they still have difficulty with that transition. They believe they're not ever going to do anything that important again.

Behind all the years of practice and all the hours of glory waits that inexorable terror of living without the game.

As a group, housewives to-day suffer more from social isolation and loss of purpose than any other social group, except, perhaps, the old.

I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

Your name or what you've done on the rugby pitch is not going to carry you through for the rest of your life. I realise I'm going to have to eventually do something else, and that does frighten me a little bit.

If you're a caretaker, who are you when there's no one else to take care of?

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

If you do base your life on how many touchdowns you score, how many championships you win, then when you have a setback, then when you have an injury, you're not playing, or something goes wrong, your self-worth goes down.

It's true: a lot of sportspeople really struggle to find something to do when they finish. It tips them into all sorts of strange things. With ex-footballers, it's really scary. I think 70% of them get divorced within five years. It's hard. You go from being really famous to not that famous. Your salary drops through the floor.

I don't know how long my body will allow me to compete, but I can't imagine doing anything else. That day will come, and I just hope there'll be a light shining down a path telling me where to go.

Retirement is purgatory for the former sports star. The world outside organized sports is unforgiving.

I do think about them things, life after football. What type of person I want to be.

Keeping your sense of self is important.

If you fix your sense of self to your job, then you're heading for disaster.

People in tennis, they've been in a certain bubble for so long they don't even know who they are, because obviously it's just been tennis, tennis, tennis. And let it be just tennis, tennis, tennis. Be locked into that. But when tennis is done, then what? It's kinda like: Let's enjoy being great at the sport.

People say people who spend too many years in prison don't know how to act when they get free. I don't know how I am going to act, how I am going to kill time, once I am not a fighter. Retirement scares me, and I have to think about how I am going to handle it.

I put way too much pressure on myself and put too much into CrossFit. It had become who I was. That's really when I figured out I don't want my identity to be CrossFit.

You lose yourself when you first become a mum. It's easy to let yourself go.

I think we identify ourselves by labels or things that we are able to do: I am this. I am a good cook. I am a good mother. I am a good this. I am a good doctor. I am a good lawyer. When you can’t do those things anymore, you wonder where your identity is.

Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.

Sport that consumed me for over two decades . . . is now gone. Now it's just me. No pressure, no expectations, no need to be fast, good, strong or to even improve. Yet I can't let go of this idea that I always need to be more than I am. And it is eating me alive.

If we have no identity apart from our jobs, we are truly vulnerable.