At the end of the day, when you command a certain power in track and field, you sometimes you have to exercise it.
At the end of the day, if you're a professional athlete in track and field you are the CEO of your company.
I grew up on basketball, volleyball, that sort of thing. For me, track and field was a whole 'nother beast.
And Clinton was like that - he saw the whole playing field. He didn't just see the event that he was at or the circumstances of that week or that month. He saw the whole playing field all the time.
In the television era, the second week of the Olympics is reserved for what is considered the marquee event: track and field.
Decathletes have to train for every event: sprints one day, field events the next. You pump up to make yourself strong enough to throw? Try pole vaulting at 250 pounds. There are 32 guys in most decathlons, and they're in 32 little track meets.
And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
When you're in the day-to-day grind, it just seems like it's another step along the way. But I find joy in the actual process, the journey, the work. It's not the end. It's not the end event.
Even though I disagree with many of the changes, when I see the privates graduate at the end of the day, when they walk off that drill field at the end of the ceremony, they are still fine privates; outstanding, well motivated privates.
At the end of the day, when all is said and done playing this game ... it doesn't matter what you did in the field, it's what you do off the field and the lives that you touch off the field.
I knew there was no money in track and field unless you were unbelievable. So I stopped it when I was 13. I just really wanted to focus on soccer and with soccer training and high school, it would have been too much if I did track and field as well.
You can't really explain competing in Olympic event to someone. You can say, "Oh, that was really tough." And that literally means nothing to someone. If you can give some sort of comparison, because that's really all track and field is about any way....Usain Bolt runs a time and you get to see what everybody else's time is. It would just be interesting to compare Olympians to somebody who doesn't train their whole life.
The Athletic Association competed against the University. So there was an event. You cannot break world records unless it is an established event, and you have three timekeepers, and the whole thing is organized.
I've been going to school, did theater for a long time, been plugging away for 10, 15 years. I was told earlier in my career, it's all laying track... one day, all that track is going to come together in some way, and it has.
New tracks like Las Vegas, hell, you could drive off the end of that track and continue safely 20 miles into the desert. But there's not a day goes by I don't think of Scott [Kalitta]. It's still traumatic.
He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive . . .