I didn’t start playing football a lot until I was in high school. I played it in seventh and eighth grade, but I didn’t play Pop Warner or anything.
After my ski jumping career finished, I went back to school to study law, and now I travel between five to 20 times a year doing after-dinner speaking, motivational talks, appearances, openings, TV and radio shows.
Today’s Little Leaguers, and there are millions of them each year, pick up how to hit and throw and field just by watching games on TV. By the time they’re out of high school, the good ones are almost ready to play professional ball.
We had guys come out of high school, Moses Malone, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, but all these guys could play.
I went to Midwood High School in Brooklyn and then to Brooklyn college for 1 1/2 years.
I worked at a nursing home though high school… There’s a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we’re so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.
In eighth grade, I wore a tie to school every day. I didn’t own jeans. But it wasn’t a granola thing, it was really more of an INXS thing.
I am all about old school romance. I love everything about the classic relationships.
Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.
My older sister, Amy Jo, and I – we are the first generation of my family to stay on at school and do any exams at all.
When I was a teeny little girl, I was in dancing school, and I sang. We had to put a dance to a song, so I went to the 10-cent store one day and looked at all the sheet music. It was all laid out, and I picked ‘Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.’
We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean… and we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect.
I was a real daydreamer at school, gazing out of the window and losing myself in imaginary worlds.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
I knew more about produce from the sea than any of my schoolmates, and my reports in school, from kindergarten on, amused and shocked my classmates and teachers. I told them how we ate with chopsticks, had rice and seaweed for breakfast, raw fish, octopus, and sea urchin eggs for supper, and cakes made from sharks.
