Athlete Transition Quotes

You go from being with the guys all the time in the locker room, in practice, having a militarized brain in terms of this schedule, and then, all of a sudden, you are on your own. You lose a sense of purpose; you lose a sense of yourself. And you lose confidence. You find yourself saying, 'I was the best at this, and now I'm not the best.'

I wish football, as a culture, bred more than just a football player. It has the ability to be an incubator and transition players properly.

It's sad to see boxers sometimes when they've come from these massive highs with thousands of people screaming for them. They're the best at what they do - then, that's it: stopped, finished.

You've got to respect your body and know the time to transition to what's next. A lot of athletes cannot transition. They don't have nothing to do after.

Had I been a great athlete, I'm not sure I would have even gone into coaching. I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.

I have so much to look forward to after football.

A lot of the athletes moved away from boxing, into UFC - which I think is really crazy, where they elbow to the head and knee to the jaw. I think that's really a barbaric sport - but boxing is coming back.

I must learn to adapt, or else I'll fall victim to the negative statistics surrounding retired athletes.

I would love to help guys transition from 'NXT' to 'Raw.'

There's not a long track record of people leaving professional sports to become a software developer.

Perhaps the most satisfying thing occurred when Michael Jordan became a team owner and said to me, 'I owe you a lot of apologies. It's a lot harder to run a team than I thought.'

It's extremely uncommon in sports to retire and have a show about you within eight months of retiring.

There are a lot of guys who football is all they have. And I love football to death, it got me here, it's what I've been doing since I was nine years old, but football ends at a point in time and you've got to be prepared for life after football.

Toughest thing for me as a young manager is that a lot of my players saw me play. They know how bad I was.

I converted from softball. We've got volleyball, we've got track and field. Athletes come from anywhere and then convert into bobsled.

Baseball players tend to have something like 20 good years in them and then around their mid-thirties they aren't in the same shape as the young guys in the league and kind of aren't worth as much. Then they retire before 40. And they are left floating adrift in the middle of the ocean.

I've seen a lot of guys who can't get beyond their playing days.