I'm a big fan of Barry Sanders and I respect him a lot. He's a guy that a lot of people talk about. He retired early and fans would have loved to see him, like myself, play three or four more years.
I loved Muggsy Bogues when he was in the league.
I've seen 48 Stanley Cups in my life. I was about six or seven when I started going to games with my dad.
I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
More than anyone else, Hank Aaron made me wish I wasn't a manager.
I can tell my grandkids that I played with Drew Brees and Tom Brady, and Flacco will definitely be added to that list.
The biggest thing I will miss is 4 July when Everton are due back for pre-season training. I loved that day. I lived for it, getting back with the lads.
I'm a professional wrestler at heart, and I miss it.
As far as sleeping goes, you're up and ready to go at six in the morning. Spring training was always a combination of relaxing and working, and I missed that quite a bit. I missed being around the ball field. A baseball. A bat. The smell of the uniform, you might say. Talking baseball. Seeing opponents as well as the Cubs.
When you have lived through something as magical as the 2014 World Cup final, you want to relive that experience as many times as possible.
I missed being considered an athlete and having that competitive drive, and missed having something to work for every day. I'd taken two and a half years away from the sport and was out of shape. I wanted to get back to where I was in 2008.
I like the way Luis Suarez plays. When I was growing up, I was a Liverpool fan, and I watched a lot of him when he came to Liverpool. He did a really good job.
I actually had a Bobby Orr action figure. You could put the pads on him and skates and all that. I was 7, and he was still playing.
I talk to people of different ages, and a guy who's 38 who says, 'I could've played Major League Baseball, but I had this knee injury...' Yeah, probably not. It's a big thing with men and sports, where they think they could have touched that thing.
I've definitely been to my fair share of Dodger games growing up. Didn't grow up too far from the stadium. That's where I first learned, first watched major-league baseball.
Me, growing up, I was a Kobe fan, Kobe fanatic, and just getting, just being able to just wear his shoes, it's my favorite shoe to play in.
I can remember that 2005 Ashes as a kid and being really absorbed in that whole series at 14 years old. It was magical.
I would love to be a player today. I had the right personality for it.
Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this.
I cherished my time playing high school sports.
John Starks is one of my favorite players.
As a kid, before I could play music, I remember baseball being the one thing that could always make me happy.
Baseball isn't statistics, it's Joe DiMaggio rounding second base.
I was honestly the No. 1 Cowboys fan as a kid.
Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world.
