When I lose the sense of motivation and the sense to prove something as a basketball player, it’s time for me to move away from the game.
I wouldn’t say I’m the best player. On the competitive level, I am the best competitor. I don’t think there’s anybody like me. I play my heart out on both ends of the floor, and I give my all.
My kid was a great baseball player. I thought I had it made. Front-row seats at Yankee Stadium. Then he turned sixteen and wanted to be a rapper.
I’m the type of player, once I get in there, I’m locked in. I’m trying to win.
If you are full of motivation as a player, if you are full of concentration, I am open arms.
I think basketball IQ, work ethic, competitiveness are probably the most important things in a basketball player.
I prefer to win titles with the team ahead of individual awards or scoring more goals than anyone else. I’m more worried about being a good person than being the best football player in the world. When all this is over, what are you left with? When I retire, I hope I am remembered for being a decent guy.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I remember when your average NFL player would come to the sideline, spit out three bicuspids, Scotch-tape his humerus together and get back out there.
I’m not an athlete, I’m a baseball player.
It had been a long journey for me just to get drafted. I had to work very hard as a collegiate player just to get recognized, being at a small school.
Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in ‘Old Maid’; the player who is finally left with it has lost.
People say I seem very negative about new music – well, if somebody asks me what I think of Keane, I’ll tell ’em. I don’t like ’em. I’ll obviously take it a step too far and grossly insult the keyboard player’s mam or summat, but I’m afraid that’s just me.
In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.
A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there’s no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.
I wanted to be a blues guitar player. And a singer. And a songwriter. Not a shock jock.
When scoring music, the idea is to ensure that your song makes it to the playlist on your audiences’ music player and stands out from the multitude of songs released every day.
Eric Clapton was such a great player. He sounds like he’s Freddie King or someone like that. He plays the roots of blues and Delta blues. He really affected me with the way that he plays, because he never really plays that many notes.
I am very happy to be signing for the best team in the world and especially proud to be the first Portuguese player to join United.
All I want to do is improve as a player.
I’m not the most powerful. I’m not the fastest. I don’t have the best arm. I don’t have any of that, but put it all together and do the little details well, and you’re going to be a very productive player.
My mental approach is totally different. My coach predicated everything on defense. He always talked about defense, defense, defense. I took it to heart that if you play defense, you can take the heart from an offensive player.
I always wanted to be a basketball player.
Be the best teammate you can be, be the best player you can be, and just be as supportive and encouraging for the people who are playing.
My sporting hero was Drazen Petrovic, the NBA basketball player, who was killed in a car accident in 1993. He was a good friend, an unbelievable player, and I dedicated my Wimbledon win to him.
I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
A ball player has to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That’s why no boy from a rich family has ever made the big leagues.
A good player is a good player, it’s just that we cannot afford signings that do not work.
Within reasonable limits, a professional player should keep busy at music.
Who says a center can’t make the pass into the post? Michael Jordan, effectively, was a post player and you saw with the championship teams players able to do multiple things.
I’m not a team player. I’m used to having total control over everything I do.
I’m an old guitar player who has fallen into television and is so happy he did.
I was in a very multi-racial, multi-cultural schooling system. I had a really delightful childhood. I was a jock. I became a very competitive swimmer in Zimbabwe. I was a swimmer, a tennis player, a hockey player. Then, when I was 13, I joined a Children’s Performing Arts workshop in Zimbabwe.
In my day, defenders played you with two hands and an elbow. You’re not getting by a guy, especially if he has an elbow and a hand on you and is a strong defensive player.
When I fight for a cause and I know it, I fight for it. I’m not scared to say something. I think some tennis player, maybe they’re a bit scared, whatever is the reason. Definitely, some athletes, they fight for big cause. They speak it loud. I think it’s great. It’s great for sport. It’s great for life.
My father, a fine chess player himself, has been a massive influence throughout my life.
I think if you enjoy teaching, if you enjoy talking about your craft, that’s probably the best way to do it… because once a player starts to get it, once he figures it out, he’ll never forget it.
Meditation is really good. I do that a lot with my bass player Bob, and we do TM: transcendental meditation.
Whether you want to be a good actor or singer, you need to be responsible and professional – and you have to learn to work well with other people and be a team player.
It’s quite strange looking down the list of players who’ve won the young player award in the past and then thinking I’m in there too now. There’s some great names like Ryan Giggs, Craig Bellamy – and I can’t miss out Chris Gunter – and it’s a big boost to be included.
Got two kids; one’s a record producer who lives just up the road from me – great guitarist and piano player, too.
Everybody in the minor leagues – if you’re a player, an announcer, whatever – wants to be in the big leagues.
I was discovered by Paul Marciano of Guess when I was actually, like, two years old. And so I started with Baby Guess; I did Guess Kids, and then I stopped because I was a really competitive horseback rider and a club volleyball player. I went to Junior Olympic qualifiers for volleyball. So, I kind of stopped modeling.
There is still this perception in football about whether people are ‘English through and through.’ Essentially there is not any such thing without going into a whole discussion on genetics and bloodlines of each player.
Even if I’m the worst player in the NBA, I’m one of the best players in the world.
I tried to emulate my favourite guitar players, the old bluesmen like Blind Willie McTell and Big Bill Broonzy. I used to sit by the record player and copy Chuck Berry and the Beatles. You can never copy someone completely, so you end up developing your own style.
Insurance – an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
I want to be a better player, and there is no other way of showing it other than on the pitch. It is not a question of which team I play for.
Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.
You hear it in the great musicians, whether it’s a drummer or a horn player or a guitar player – you hear them take those breaths. You can feel that there’s something they’re trying to tell you.
I had a little radio next to the bed and I’d just listen to the top 10 – I mean, it was crap but I was young – and I would get up in the dark with the moon coming in through the window and I would just dance in my pajamas in the dark to the top 10. I didn’t have a CD player… so it was kind of all I had, you know?
Well I think in all the thirty years I’ve been doing this now and being gone from home and all that stuff it’s really, it’s not about what I’ve achieved and if I’ve become a better player, or played better ten years ago than I do today.
I want to be a role-model player, someone respected and looked up to.
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.
I think each player has an individual style. Each is concerned with giving the best to his team, and I think my best talent is dribbling and setting up goal situations, giving an assist or deceiving one of the other team’s players.
Of course money is important – to say it is not in football would be a lie. But to find a good player with potential for a small amount of money and then to develop him in the group is a great pleasure for a manager and for a club.
When you play with another piano player, it’s just second nature to play the parts that need to be played.
I had practiced with the team, and the first scheduled game was with the University of Missouri. They made it quite clear to the Army that they would not play a team with a black player on it. Instead of telling me the truth, the Army gave me leave to go home.
