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.
My sophomore year I spent exactly one day on the JV football team. It was the tryout day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As an athlete, the body can fail you. I know. The mind and your education will be there to keep carrying you.
Bad ballplayers make good managers.
I was a horrible athlete.
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'm not the first quarterback to have an off game. I won't be the last.
Anybody who has played sports and says they have never choked is lying to you.
No team wanted me. No overseas team. Not even a D-League team.
I was not successful as a ball player, as it was a game of skill.
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.
I'll be remembered as the biggest bust in NBA history. But I can't do nothing about that.
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 played football. I was pretty bad at that.
In those days I was terrible at athletics and never made a team, but quite easily led my class in academics.
I was reminded that when we lose and I strike out, a billion people in China don't care.
