A Quote by Ainsley Harriott

My dad Chester was a pianist and later a well-known television entertainer so football was never really something that was on his radar. However when I was a young boy a family friend took me to see an Arsenal game and from that moment on I was totally and utterly hooked.
Dad had great people investing in his life at a young age. His mother, his stepfather, his Boy Scout leader, his football coach. That's where integrity is planted, like seeds that are harvested later.
Rather than opera, football is more like ballet or a chess game. You can really see it in a team like Arsenal, especially when Dennis Bergkamp was playing. He seemed to be able to read the game like a chessboard and knew where a player would be several seconds later and put the ball there for him.
I played football ever since I was a little boy. Coming from a family of six boys, I guess we learned the game of football from a very young age.
I like Stevie Wonder as my favorite non-pianist pianist. I mean, I shouldn't call him a non-pianist, because he's really a great pianist, but he doesn't feature it that much - he uses his keyboards and his piano technique to support his great songs and so forth, but he can really blow.
I remember being a kid, I was a little kid when my dad took me to 'Munchausen.' I guess he took my whole family, but I kind of didn't want to go for some reason. Then we got there, and I was so mesmerized by the movie, and I was really taken by the young Sarah Polley. I didn't realize until many, many years later that it was Sarah Polley.
He has nothing to do with me and football really. I don't see any need for us to start talking about football. Some players have relationships with their fathers where they talk football and get into arguments about it. It is something we have never done. It is just a natural thing, he is my dad and not my coach.
Everything we did on the training pitch, we did with the ball. You'll never see a pianist run around his piano. People ask me, 'Why don't you run through the forest, through the trees?' Well, I've never seen a tree on a football field.
As a working-class boy, golf was never really on my radar, and when I was growing up, Irish football was my sporting passion.
You know, I went through the whole blond hair bit. And dad took me to see The Police when I was 13. And I was like, this is a cool band, dad. See this is a cool band. And I felt bad for years because then a year later... I never had a chance to tell him how great I think was. After he passed away, I would go and listen to his music.
If you were ever to interview me after a football game or at a football game or around me during football season is totally different than when you catch me away from football.
My dad played football - and tennis as well - and so did my brothers. My dad was chairman of our local club, Spartans, for a while. But back when I was a boy, people didn't think of football as a career.
My dad took me to a high school basketball game and this very, very famous coach in Michigan, by the name of Lofton Greene - he was a guy that my dad was familiar with. He was from our hometown. And I watched the game and I said I didn't see this guy doing a lot of coaching. And my dad told me, well, it's just like a teacher - which he was - he said if you do a good job teaching during the week, when they take the test on Friday, that's not the time you have to do a lot of demonstrative things.
I enjoyed [playing lawyer in From The Hip] as an ode to my dad. My dad went to Harvard and Harvard Law School, so he had some friends that practiced in Boston. So, there was a big law firm that he hooked me up with the senior partner, then the senior partner hooked me up with a young lawyer who worked in the firm. And the young lawyer was married to a public defender. So I would hang out with them, and I could see both sides of it, those that are corporate attorneys and those that help the poor and the disenfranchised.
My dad was young. He went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. That didn't seem to be in the nature of - in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really. They were - we had a cousin that went to - off to Brown University. It was like a nuclear explosion took place.
OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me 'Trey' because I'm William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I'm also known.
A traveling show visited a country town and one of the acts was advertised as a striptease. A small boy begged his mother for a quarter to buy a ticket, but the mother refused, telling her son that if he went to that show he would see something awful. Well, the boy sneaked in the show and the first thing he saw was something awful - his own dad sitting on the front row.
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