If you watch any John Hughes film of the eighties, that was my childhood experience.
When you’re coming up, and you have Matt Hughes, Tim Sylvia, Jens Pulver and Pat Miletich, Jeremy Horn to train with and compete with – guys that have fought in Japan, all over the world – and you see these guys every day, you just embrace the grind and get after it: you have no choice but to succeed.
At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn’t Brown or Smith or Hughes.
I didn’t know who Langston Hughes was till he met me backstage.
We made sure that Ian Gwyn Hughes from the media department gave a speech about the anthem. We translated it into English, what the meaning of it is and it is very powerful.
I read that John Hughes script for ‘Mr. Mom,’ and I thought, ‘This guy is a funny writer.’ I went: ‘You ought to stick around and direct this thing.’ But he didn’t; he left, and look what he became. A really legendary comedy director.
When I was in high school, I remember writing a research paper, and the teacher said I should write about Langston Hughes. I felt as if I was the only black dude who didn’t like Langston Hughes. He didn’t seem as dark and layered as someone like Flannery O’Connor.
I respect Mark Hughes, and I respect what he has done for me.
I’d see movies, comedies, and I loved ‘Animal House’, I loved all the John Hughes stuff, but I never saw me and my friends totally represented.
Adding a player like Jack Hughes, a lot of teams in the NHL would dream of that talent.
Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.
I think saying ‘a John Hughes movie’ is just shorthand for a lot of people to say ‘a coming-of-age story,’ because I think, when you’re of a certain age, that’s what John Hughes means to you.
History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes’s reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.
The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.
If I beat Hughes they’ll say he was done before our fight. There’s always going to be those guys that play up the negative part of it, I don’t pay too much attention to that.
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