I was 19 years old, pumping gas and going nowhere. I was kind of a high school dropout at that point because I had left school to play hockey, but no one drafted me.
It took years, honestly, to deal with the disappointment of Beijing.
I feel bad when my film flops.
I wanted it to be like Amy Grant, but it didn't pan out that way. My label actually went bankrupt, and I was left without a home.
I failed myself when I ruined a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be Robert Griffin III's running mate during his Heisman Trophy-winning season at Baylor.
I was sure I'd set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth - that I hadn't set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if 'The Big Trail' had been a success and launched me as a star.
Let's face it, I'm a has-been.
It hurts when you are at a club you loved, a place where you think you might want to end your career, and things go badly.
People saying, 'Life didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.' Welcome to the club. I wanted to be the starting center-fielder for the Boston Red Sox, for chrissakes!
I had been on several shows that were meant to be the big ones, that would go on forever, and they didn't.
My biggest loss was the Olympics. I just can't forget losing. I never will.
I think one of the saving illusions of the film business is everything seems like it's about to happen. It's always about to happen. It's only looking back that you see the wasteland.
At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.
Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.
If I didn't make it in baseball, I won't have made it workin'. I didn't like to work.
I wish I had had a great disappointment, a real one.
And I didn't, that's why my career was very short lived.
At this point, I've really failed at a lot of things. It's nice to be able to say that, in a way. I've failed at music. I've failed at dance. And acting - there have been times when I went out and read lines to audition for acting parts. I believe that if anybody wrangled together those audition tapes, it would be pretty hysterically funny.
The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It's just the end of an illusion.
My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment.
I auditioned for 'American Idol' at 17. They told me, 'No.'
For me, not making the playoffs is a wasted season, a waste of time.
Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.
After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.
I would say I was jock. I went to Sierra College. I was a big baseball player. Getting into the MLB was my dream - to become a left-handed pitcher for the Yankees. That's what I was hoping, but life kind of went the other way.
