In the age of millennials, women’s rights, and female empowerment, I hope my voice helps to encourage the next generation of great female athletes and golfers to possibly stop social injustices and prejudices from creeping into the game that I fell in love with at such a young age.
All you’ve ever seen in the UFC was the greatest athletes in the world. Never, ever did we do a freakshow and we won’t.
A lot of athletes go from not making any money at all to make any large pot of money. Then they get approached by an agent who takes a percentage. Then they get approached by your financial advisor who starts investing your money without you even understanding what he’s doing.
There’s no private side to acting, which some people find hard. I’ve drawn inspiration from athletes. They manage to be themselves under the pressure of public scrutiny, and they have it much harder – they have to perform with people yelling at them.
I think that the potential of Total Divas and female athletes is that the sky is the limit. People want to know about these women, and in the WWE, we call it the Divas Revolution – it’s a movement for women’s empowerment.
We’re professional athletes, and we have moments where we step back, and we have to think and assess everything in life.
Becoming a coach has to be in your blood. There are hundreds and thousands of former athletes out there, but there are maybe only 10 people who want to dedicate their lives by taking on a job as a coach. Not only a master, a coach should also be a brother or sister to his apprentices.
Athletes vs Cancer is a foundation that I started in 2008 after I lost my mom to cancer in 2007, and our goal is early detection, preventative screening and just really spreading knowledge about the cancer disease.
Considering retirement is like skirting with the reality of what’s to come, and I think that’s why so many athletes decide to do more introspection at that point.
I always love being able to dance with athletes because they just know how to be coached.
I applaud the professional athletes using their platform to voice their opinions.
I’m not a union guy in the sense that I know a lot about how they operate. But I know fighters. They are individual athletes. This is not a team sport. I think it’s going to be hard to say, ‘Hey, do you mind not fighting on Saturday and walking around the arena with a picket sign instead?’ I just don’t see it.
In terms of trying to inspire other people with faith to play and stuff I am very proud of that. I remember seeing Muslim athletes or guys with other faiths performing and still carrying the label of being a religious person and it does inspire people.
The problem with these UFC fighters – and they’re all fantastic athletes, top of the line in the entire world – is that they wear their bodies down in these training camps. All these guys that are cutting weight are just destroying their own bodies.
I’ve had over a dozen models come in and pose fro me live for these new Cirque pieces. Cirque is a world-wide phenomenon and they are just incredible athletes. I’ve been to all the performances and am really fascinated by all of their productions.
People want athletes to cater to their image of what an athlete should be, but they also want them to fail so they can feel like their screwups are all right. If I make a priority shift, I’ll make it because it’s best for me.
I don’t think some athletes understand how big it is to be an athlete, what they can do with just a simple gesture of shaking a kid’s hand. It can make a fan’s day. It can make a fan’s life.
The street to obscurity is paved with athletes who can perform great feats before friendly crowds.
Sometimes women get devastated by failing. Athletes don’t; they just know that means they’ve got to practise harder, and they’ve got to do something else differently.
Much in the way Olympic athletes optimize their game by paying an enormous – borderline maniacal – amount of attention to things like diet, exercise, sleep, and of course the essential R&R, we all would do well to pay more attention to those key aspects of our lives that comprise our overall health equation.
I meet athletes from different backgrounds and see they share the same mentality and process as other athletes in other sports.
Everyone in Norman knew our block. There were five kids in our neighborhood who started at QB in high school. We had Division-I athletes from a number of sports available to play at any moment.
The mind is absolutely instrumental in achieving results, even for athletes. Sports psychology is a very small part, but it’s extremely important when you’re winning and losing races by hundredths and even thousandths of a second.
I’m a big believer in the student-athlete part. I value the education and what it provides for you. Football is a vocation. Only 1.67 percent of these athletes go on to the NFL. An education provides you an opportunity for a career. A lot of people just don’t get that. To say they aren’t getting anything is misinformed.
The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don’t want to go back to the beginning again.
Incorporating science, technology, engineering, analytics and medicine to athletes’ training and development not just at elite level but basing it right at the grassroots level is important.
Look, there’s no proof that athletes like us who may have higher testosterone levels are benefiting from this natural human body trait.
When you become famous, you start getting invites to parties where there are famous athletes and famous rock stars, politicians, people who have tremendous power and affluence. It’s not in my DNA, but certainly I have been exposed to it.
When Complex hired me, originally I wasn’t at First We Feast, I was just like a hired hand for Complex. They’d send me out to different events or they’d have people visiting the office and I’d do interviews with athletes, musicians, whoever.
Some athletes feel they have to show they’re confident and talk about what they’re going to achieve. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with just quietly believing in yourself and just getting on with it. You don’t have to talk about it all the time; you want your performances to show for it.
My guess is many top athletes, distance runners included, use performance-enhancing drugs, enough so that the problem must be tackled.
I was runner that really started focusing on swimming at a very young age, and that’s kind of how I got into acting. I was at a school for gifted athletes and gifted artists, and I got injured one year and started hanging out with all the actors and dancers and all those crazy people and started getting the bug.
We can do a lot of different things as athletes – we can speak, we can mentor, we can coach.
One of the perks of being an actor is to get to meet athletes that you respect. Especially who played before my time. Brooks Robinson is one of those athletes; they just don’t make them any nicer.
In this culture, where entertainers and athletes wield such power, it seems only right to me that they try to make their influence a good one.
As athletes, we’re always trained to play through stuff. And I’ve played through all types of injuries – ankle sprains, shoulder, whatever – and with the brain it’s just different.
When I was young, I never dreamed about winning a national championship. I didn’t even play basketball. But I was tall. And long. And had large hands. I was made for the game. It found me later in life, compared to most collegiate athletes.
I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.
As athletes, when you find something that gets to someone you have to press their buttons.
If you talk to most athletes, the place you’re most comfortable is your playing field. I’m not so comfortable at a podium or talking about events.
Going back to the ’70s and ’80s I was one of the athletes who believed in true sport. I never took medical supplements, believed in diet and exercising. I always represent clean athletes.
Just being here at the Olympics is pretty incredible in itself. Seeing the unity of the athletes and to see how everyone has worked so hard to get here – and we are all so excited to be here – it’s awesome to be able to experience it.
I don’t want to say I was ever scared to voice my opinion. I was just trying to make a good example, I guess you could say. And even when I’m more outspoken, I believe that I am still making a good example for younger athletes and also future athletes.
I want to inspire the next generation of athletes, not just figure skaters.
When you’re young, you do dumb things. I just can’t understand why some other athletes never were extended that same excuse.
The style is getting faster and faster. The athletes are getting better and better. The future is pretty bright for WWE.
What if you didn’t have education for sports? People with a natural inclination for sports, athletes without any kind of education, without any kind of training, they would just be couch athletes instead of the world class Olympians that we have.
In reality, we can prove that the incidents of drug, alcohol abuse and violence have dropped dramatically among professional athletes – but the problem is it would be impossible to convince than fans, because of what they read on the AP wire.
