Sports Fame Quotes

My life has been a whirlwind since the '94 Olympics.

When I wasn't famous, I had a lot of friends, almost all of them Italian. The racism only started when I started to play football.

When I plummeted into infamy in the Calgary Olympics, I never thought that a film would be made about my life.

The nice thing is that when people come up to me, it's the football they remember, not all the other rubbish.

People forget that I'm a human being, just because I play a sport that everybody loves. We're human. We're not invincible. We share the same feelings and emotions that people on the outside feel. I don't think people really understand that.

Every kid who just played basketball knew about the Boston Celtics. They're one of the few teams who were always on national TV along with the Lakers.

I never asked to be the highest paid player in sports.

The accomplishments in college and even in the pros are more in my mind because you constantly see Duke on TV during basketball season. You constantly see the NBA.

The most famous athletes throughout the history of time are fighters.

I never dreamed about being a millionaire - I dreamed about being a football player.

Nobody worked as hard to make snooker a popular sport as I did.

My father, Jimmy Walker, was the first pick in the 1967 draft, but I never met him. He passed in 2007. I found out about him in middle school. I was old enough to understand who he was, where he went to college, and what his game was about. Older players like Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have come up to me to talk about him.

On that Sunday of the Masters I remember turning on ESPN to find people talking about me. I switched over to the Golf Channel and people were talking about me. It was hard to escape.

I never realized that batting a little ball around could cause so much commotion. I now know how (Charles) Lindbergh must have felt when he returned from St. Louis.

It's not that people voted for me because I was an athlete, but what did help was that people knew my name.... The two Olympic gold medals were the most important contributions to my campaign fund.

If you are a top player in England, the cult around you is bigger than in Germany.

When LeBron James shows up at your doorstep, you're going to let him practice with your team if not join the team.

Making it to the Final Four, you feel like you're watched on campus. You're in the classroom, professors are talking about it.

Buenos Aires is less than an hour's drive from the ranch, and in the evening, we might meet friends for dinner there. I get recognised a bit, but I'm lucky that polo isn't as popular as other sports.

Where I grew up, people obviously knew my dad because it's a small place and he was the top player for Swinton - they'd go and watch him play, see him in the papers, so they knew he was black.

I am used to the hype because I played in the NBA.

It's a big compliment that so many people want to see me. For them, it's all about football. That's what they remember about me.

I became famous when I scored that goal for Mogi Mirim direct from the kick-off against Noroeste. It was 18 April 1993, if I'm not mistaken. After that, my name was in all the papers.

You think that after becoming world champion, you're going to be a massive superstar with lots of lucrative bouts against great fighters, but that never materialised for me.

Playing on Saturdays, seeing 75,000 people yell your name, 88, ASJ, and all of that stuff is great.