A Quote by Gary Woodland

My dad never forced me to do anything. But if I did it, if I decided to go play catch or basketball, he was hard on me. You had to do it the right way if you were going to do it. He never let me win.
You can take your Jake Roberts and your Hulk Hogans and your Ultimate Warriors and a lot of these guys that were big names back then, but they never did anything for me. They never helped me, they never thought of helping me, and when they had a chance to help me, they never did.
My dad told me, 'If you're going to go out there and play baseball, or you're going to play basketball or football, work hard at it no matter what. I want you to have fun with your buddies, but you have to put in the time because this is your craft.' He didn't just want me to be good. He pushed me to that next level.
I had a lot of respect for what my dad did and the success that he had. I wanted to give it a try. He never forced me in any way to go this route. It was my decision. He would push me to work harder at it but only because it was my decision to race. If there was ever a day when I didn't want to do it any more, he would be fine.
First of all, I was a good Christian kid. My mom and dad taught me never to fight. So I never fought. The other kids picked that up right away. They said, 'Oh, he's not going to try to do anything.' They'd push me, shove me, hit me. I'd just stand there and take it.
My mom and my dad never pushed me into performing. They never prohibited me from trying anything, or being anything. They never restricted me in any way. For which I'll be forever grateful.
My dad never really taught me anything about the game, he was never on me in the basketball aspect of life.
Basketball is what got me out of the projects. It got my momma the house she never had, the car she never had. Nobody is going to get the best of me. You might score more points than me, but you're going to know you were in a dogfight.
I never got in a conflict. I didn't want Don Shula to say a word to me at all. My play emphasized that. He couldn't get me for anything or whatever. After that we were ok. I just didn't like the way they used me at the end of the 1963 season going in 1964. I felt that they played games with me.
I know people that was playing basketball better than me. If they were in the NBA, they could be All-Stars, those people. They just never had the opportunity to go play professional basketball in Europe.
Since I was small, my dad and I have always been friends. He was never really hard on me. He never really pushed me to basketball.
But at the same time, my parents always encouraged my brother and me to be happy with what we were doing. My parents were athletes in high school; my mom and my dad were the stars of the basketball team, but they never pushed my brother and me to be anything we didn't want to be.
I want to thank my mom, Brenda Rose. My heart, the reason I play the way I play, just everything. Just knowing the days I don't feel right, going to practice, having a hard time, I think about her when she had to wake me up, go to work and make sure I was all right. Those were hard days.
Going to the gym was never about 'working out' like it is for most people. To me, It was a matter of life or death. It was either me or the weights-and I was going to win. I've always had that competitive streak, whether it was in the gym, on the stage, or In anything else I did.
My direction as a person working in film has been to never get comfortable with anything I was doing. At the time that I decided to do action films, people were telling me, "Well, you can't do it. You're not that type. It's not going to work." And so obviously that made me think, "Well, that's not comfortable. Maybe I should try it. What can I do with it?" So I did that, and I'm glad I did it. I'll probably do it again, and I did other kinds of things that seemed like challenges for me, because I like being on the high wire.
When Jim Irsay called me five years ago, he told me, 'I want you to be our coach and help us win the Super Bowl.' He told me, 'We are going win it the right way. We are going to win it with great guys; win it with class and dignity. We are going to win it in a way that will make Indianapolis proud.'
I would never accept a role that wasn't going to stretch me or challenge me in some way. I'd say Holy Smoke! probably did that more than anything I'd ever done. It took me to places I didn't actually know I could go to, and that's what I want my career to be all about.
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