A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
My grandfather, on my father’s side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
I had that mindset that I feel that I am the best prospect in the draft, but everything happens for a reason.
You want to be in the first round. That’s the dream. That’s what you see on draft night.
With TV, your first draft just doesn’t matter. It’s a skeleton, and then there’s draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It’s just a whole different kind of storytelling.
After I graduated from Tuskegee with a masters in nuclear engineering, the draft was on so I signed up for ROTC. I figured if I had to go into the military, I’d rather go in as an officer.
The NBA is sometimes a crazy business, and we’ve seen crazy trades and crazy stuff happening the same night of the draft.
Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we’ve been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.
Writing, yeah. Me and my friend Scott Bloom just finished the first rough draft of a script. It’s taken us three years to do, but we finally got a first draft. And we’ll see whatever happens with that.
I carried around a lot of weight and anxiety – expectations of being a top draft pick and fulfilling those. It was really burdensome and not fun. Stressful. I had to go through some things before I finally turned that around and got back to playing for the right reasons.
When I volunteered for the draft as a 20-year-old, mischievous guy at the height of the Vietnam War, most thought I was destined to pass from this earth early!
In high school, I told my trainer Keith I wanted to be the No. 1 player in the country and the No. 1 draft pick.
I used to tell people that in 2012 when I was trying to understand where am I most likely to be drafted and who are the three or four teams that have pursued me the most and it would make sense that they would pick me, I never thought of who would be least likely to draft me.
As a matter of policy from the beginning with our team, there have been three things we’ve said we won’t draft a player: if they’ve been involved in domestic violence, drug abuse, or if they show lack of respect for authority.
I want to stay with the Tennessee Titans. They are the ones that took a chance on me – 31 teams passed on me on the draft and they selected me.
It’s been a dream of mine to play in the NFL, so whenever I hear my name being talked about in someone’s mock draft or whether or not he should stay or go, it’s always interesting to listen to, but at the same time, I don’t take it for granted.
You should always go through the first draft of a book all at once, I think, to get the best results. You can take time off after the first draft and come back to it fresh.
In L.A., we have a saying – ‘What do you do?’ It’s less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer – I write about games.
In 1969, we decided we had to do certain things technically to win, and we decided to do them then, even though we knew some of the personnel couldn’t do it. In other words, instead of adapting the system to the players, we just installed our system. Then we set out to fill our team through the draft.
I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It’s much more fun to play with something that already exists.
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of ‘Salvage the Bones’ at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story’s flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it’s almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you’ve already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
In a first draft, I concentrate on moving forward and trying not to panic.
I think as you’re approaching Draft day, you’re thinking about all of the possibilities, and you know that’s one way you can improve your club.
It’s 2010. I’m forty-three years old. I’ve just turned in the final draft of what will be my third novel when I decide I want a tattoo. Maybe it’s a middle-age thing. Or maybe now that my kids are nearly grown and I have a career in place, I’m finally coming into my own.
I have plans of becoming a director soon. I just finished my script. I don’t know when I’ll direct the film. It is ready and has reached its third draft.
I don’t know if six picks in a draft is a record, it’s not the kind of thing I would look at, but it’s unusual.
First of all, I want to thank the Buccaneers for giving me the opportunity and for picking me in the draft. This is the nature of the beast, though, and this is a new start for me. I wish them the best of luck, and I am just glad to be a Bear.
In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for president via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly.
Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.
I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
I didn’t care about the draft. I didn’t want to do the workouts – they put you in two-on-two full-court drills with guards. That’s not going to help me.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.
New Yorkers should know that no one in the Administration, at the Department of Defense, or at the Selective Service System is advocating the reinstatement of the mandatory draft in any form.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
I talk about the NFL Draft on a daily basis because this is the sport I cover – this is the show I do – and I talk about everything that’s taking place every single day.
I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.
When the draft comes and goes, there’s a certain set of players you acquire and there’s a whole bunch of others you had interest in acquiring. That doesn’t die.
The Iraqis have once again failed to meet a deadline for a final draft of the constitution.
Francisco Garcia could have been a high draft choice last year, probably in the 20s. He’s the best wing player I’ve ever coached. But he’s done it the right way. He knew he had to work on his body to become a good pro. When he goes into the pros, he’ll be physically ready.
I will never support a draft.
I still wake up thinking about draft choices we should have made that would have impacted the franchise for a long time, but I don’t wake up thinking about one individual player move.
Any time you have defensive ends going above you in the draft, when you know you put up numbers that were equal to better, you just have to use that as motivation. Whenever you’re the underdog, you have to have the right attitude and just go out there and be yourself; just play.
While the web is very much the first draft of history, a rough-cut, it still has to be good journalism, well-sourced, reliable. Clearly, the printed form is going to have more effort put into it, going to be more reflective and relevant.
My philosophy is that you don’t motivate players with speeches; you have motivated players that you draft. That’s where they come in, and those are the guys that are competitive. You can not teach competitiveness.
I’m the only one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that has Final Draft on my computer. Then you show up and go to any coffee shop in L.A., and there are a hundred people your age with Final Draft.
You have to build your core nucleus of your team through your draft. What that does is you basically introduce them to your culture and your environment. Then, as guys begin to perform and play to that level, then you say, ‘You know what? You guys deserve an extension, so here it is.’
‘Rent’ was a special project for me. It was my first notable screenplay job. I worked with two wonderful directors on it, starting with Spike Lee in the summer of 2001. I wrote a draft for Spike and he was really good to me.
I want to warn anyone who sees the Peace Corps as an alternative to the draft that life may well be easier at Fort Dix or at apost in Germany than it will be with us.
I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don’t go out. I’m just locked away, writing. It’s a time of meditation, of going into the story.
The biggest takeaway from a memoir is that you have to play fair. Within the first draft, I was writing very angrily because I had a lot of resentment and a lot to process. Through revision is where a lot of learning happened and a lot of forgiveness happened.
