My Marine experience helped shape who I am now personally and professionally, and I am grateful for that on an almost daily basis.
To have a huge, friendly whale willingly approach your boat and look you straight in the eye is without doubt one of the most extraordinary experiences on the planet.
I liked being in the Marines. They gave me discipline I could live with. By the time I got out, I was able to cope with things on a more realistic level.
I love the ocean. Boats, not so much.
I went to sea from the most tender age and have continued in a sea life to this day. Whoever gives himself up to this art wants to know the secrets of Nature here below. It is more than forty years that I have been thus engaged. Wherever any one has sailed, there I have sailed.
I don't use cages - I've been surrounded by 150 to 200 sharks, not once ever been close to being bitten.
To this day, I haven't seen 'Jaws.' Because I was always in the ocean, when I was a kid, my mom said, 'See the movies that you want to, but I'm telling you, do not ever see Jaws.'
I came to my first Colts training camp in July of 1950, and it was murder, absolute murder. We had a coach named Clem Crow who must have been nuts. You got to remember that I'd been a Marine, had gone through basic training and spent 26 months in the Pacific during WWII, but the Marine drill instructors had nothing on Clem.
