I pulled a hamstring during the New York City Marathon. An hour into the race, I jumped off the couch.
The basketball coach cut me within two days, so I was back in the pool. I was the first one in the wall after the first 25 yards, but the last one out because I didn't have a flip turn.
Not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe my greatest.
Apparently I'm not a pro cyclist.
Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.
When I went to high school, an all-boys' school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn't make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.
My sophomore year I spent exactly one day on the JV football team. It was the tryout day.
He looks like a greyhound, but he runs like a bus.
All American males are failed athletes, and it was big time even if it was Little League. It meant a lot to you.
In Canada, for boys, your identity is built on hockey. It's your social position; it's everything. And I was the worst hockey player of Canada.
Bad ballplayers make good managers.
I got real bored in '96. Wasn't nobody to fight. Nothing to look forward to. That's when I started playing basketball again. Had I not started playing basketball, my boxing career would have failed. But I went from a sport where nobody could touch me to another where I couldn't touch nobody.
I was a horrible athlete.
As an athlete, the body can fail you. I know. The mind and your education will be there to keep carrying you.
Anybody who has played sports and says they have never choked is lying to you.
I'm not the first quarterback to have an off game. I won't be the last.
I was not successful as a ball player, as it was a game of skill.
I always wanted to be an athlete. Then when I realized that I can't run very fast, jump very high, or catch anything, I thought, 'Maybe if this doesn't work out, I can be an actor.'
I played no sports well. Because I was a boy in the United States Of America, I was forced into Little League and played horrible Little League baseball, and played football and basketball in school situations where I was forced to.
No team wanted me. No overseas team. Not even a D-League team.
When I came to New York for the draft in '89, they told me I should be like 10 and 15, and it didn't happen. So I was very disappointed, like, nobody wants me.
I'll be remembered as the biggest bust in NBA history. But I can't do nothing about that.
I played football. I was pretty bad at that.
In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.
In those days I was terrible at athletics and never made a team, but quite easily led my class in academics.
