I don't think anyone could be the next Dick Vitale. I mean that in a good way. More than an announcer, Dick is an ambassador for the game. Dick is in class by himself. Like what he does or not, what he has done to expand the popularity of college basketball is phenomenal.
Dick Vitale always used to say to me, 'Remember, this is an entertainment medium.' People are not tuning in to a game to know how smart you are about basketball; they wanna enjoy it. And it took Dick years of saying that for me to settle in and say, 'It's also okay for me to have a little fun on the air.'
One of my dreams was being called a 'Diaper Dandy' by Dick Vitale. He calls me that all the time now. It's surreal.
Dick Moss, my agent. Dick became my agent in 1979 when I signed my contract with the Houston Astros.
I live in a high-rise apartment building, so I just have two cats. They're both pound kitties. One of them, Dick, is an evil, foot-biting cat. When I write a tiger morph, I'm always imagining Dick.
When I was a kid, I was kind of obsessed with that movie 'Dick Tracy.' Burger King had all this 'Dick Tracy' stuff, and I collected all of it, and I had the posters, and I watched it on a loop.
And then Dick called and said, I'm going to do a special called Dick Van Dyke and the other woman, that would be you, because every time I try to check into a hotel with my wife, they look at me as though I'm cheating on Laura.
I probably remember more about 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' than Dick Van Dyke does.
I do want to be a representative of the African community, and I want to hold myself and dress myself in a way that reflects that. I want black kids to see me and think, 'Okay, he's carrying himself as a black man, and that's how a black man should carry himself.'
It would seem that some black people want to say that when you, as a black, become successful, you cease to be black. That's ridiculous.
I'm a black man that is proud to be black, and I want to help the black community, but I love all mankind.
I know I'm black. Everyone knows I'm black. But I don't want to be defined as a black hockey player.
At 50, I thought proudly: Here we are, half century! Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black Afro wig, wore black clothes and hung a black wreath on my door.
I remember seeing this picture my mother had of Dick Clark. It didn't inspire me to be an actor or anything, but when I did 'American Dreams' with Dick Clark, my mother came out, and she showed him this picture of them that was taken 35 years earlier. It was great.
I want to burn as a beacon of possibility. I don't want nobody to misconstrue the commercial success I've had as anything other than an example of what black music is capable of. And what it's capable of is being more than just black. I'm not black or white anymore. I'm Cee Lo Green.
As a black member of parliament and minister for nearly a decade, I was determined not to be defined by my race. I didn't want to be 'the black politician', when being black is just a part of who I am.