I was a good shooter in college, but it's a different level here in the NBA and I'm working on getting better.
I wasn't really comfortable going to college.
What's the first thing I remember about the University of New Brunswick? That's easy. The year before I had gone to Mount St. Vincent in Halifax, which was an all girls' school. That didn't really work out for me. But at UNB, there were six or seven men for every woman, which suited me just fine.
'After 17' is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, 'Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,' but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child.
I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America - my parents were born in Cuba - and we didn't yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car.
I was at Wesleyan first. I was there for a semester because I wanted that traditional college vibe. But when I got there, people would do normal college things, and I was like, 'I can't be here. This is a nightmare.'
I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It took me forever to leave Chicago. I went to Columbia College because I wasn't ready to leave! My professors had to kick me in the pants to move to Los Angeles.
NFL Europe helped me quite a bit. It was a situation where I came out of college and spent the first few months of my career over in Europe.
When you go to college, you're on your own. It's you and God. It's a question of what are you made of and how much is God a part of your life. So when I went off to college, I knew that was going to be the case.
One day, though, I was asked if I'd like to go to the University of Florida and become a Gator.
I didn't really get comfortable until I got to UCLA, and I had to take an acting course because I was studying theater arts.
I wish we could have one big A&M rally - a meeting. I had no hard feelings toward the situation just because, you know, leaving the school and everything, it just wasn't the best fit.
I started college Pre-Med. That lasted about half a semester.
I didn't think reaching the NBA was a possibility when I coached Derby in 1990. I was right out of college when I went there and was more concerned about playing a bit and getting that out of my system.
It's weird that I'm putting my old green and gold jersey, and I'm moving on to the cardinal and white. I'm a Stanford Cardinal.
It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.
At Rochester, I came with the same emotions as many of the entering freshman: everything was new, exciting and a bit overwhelming, but at least nobody had heard of my brothers and cousins.
I have an opera coach who I went to as a teenager, when I was 15 and 16 years old. When I went to college, I forgot about it.
I didn't have an acting job when I moved to L.A. I was just naive enough to think that moving to L.A. was the next step after college. My parents were really supportive.
I led the state in defensive interceptions my senior year, with seven in nine games. Then I went to Montana to play basketball and found out quickly that my college career wasn't going to work out how I'd envisioned it.
The big experience of feeling like I jumped off into the deep end was that transition from college into the workforce. There were so many unwritten rules I didn't understand.
My grandmother came with me when I moved out to New York. She stayed with me for a week. I was, you know, living in the dorm. The first year, I had a lot of anxiety, and, I remember, my teachers kept saying I had so much jaw tension.
Heading into college, I was mainly just a spot-up shooter.
Heartbreak comes in different sizes, and the departure of an 18-year-old child for a far college has to be treated as a very benign form of the disease.
