I was really mad until the 23rd pick and I wasn't selected and my agent told me, 'If nobody selects you, you're going to the Lakers.' So I was hoping to not go in the first round of the draft.
I was a last round draft pick. Nobody wanted me. I could count the amount of scouts that told me to go to school, to forget baseball.
I felt like I was one of the better point guards in the draft, maybe the best. But falling out of the first round and being selected in the second round, the number really doesn't matter where you get drafted - it's about the fit.
In the NFL you get one first-round draft pick if you're lucky. You couldn't really outwork anybody else. In college I could recruit ten players with first-round talent every year.
Nobody told me there was any idea for a sequel to 'The Exorcist.' But my agent called me to tell me they were going to do it, and there was a part for me. I said, 'But I died in the first film.' 'Well,' he told me, 'this is from the early days of Father Merrin's life.' I told him I just didn't want to do it again.
I was a pitcher, shortstop and outfielder, and the Yankees tried to sign me out of high school as a first-round draft pick in 1981. I turned them down to go to college.
Being a first-round draft pick means nothing to me without my education.
On draft day, I wasn't really nervous at all. Then you turn on the draft, the first five picks go by, and then you still thinking, 'Oh man, I don't know where I'm going to go.' It's really just, by the time draft hits, that's when you get nervous.
If you had first pick in the all-free agent NBA draft, you'd take LeBron James.
I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don't go out. I'm just locked away, writing. It's a time of meditation, of going into the story.
Once you get into the NFL, it doesn't matter what draft pick you are, what round you are, if you're undrafted or not. It's football time again. The draft, all of that doesn't matter anymore.
I think early in my development as a quarterback, before I ever got a Division I college offer or anything, my brother was in the spotlight, first-round draft pick. People expected me to be him, but I was underdeveloped, undersized, unrecruited... so it was tough at that point.
I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Anyway, what does mad mean exactly?" Rami added quickly "Aren't we all a little mad? Don't we have to be somehat mad just to go on living, to go on hoping?
Yes, the first draft is the key. That's why I put so much energy, focus, and attention on the first draft, because I respect that first go at the story. If I don't have the key in that first draft, I invariably won't get it in subsequent drafts, though I can craft around it.
I was pretty darn lucky to be selected by the Steelers. A round earlier or later in the draft and I might have been with a team that didn't make it to the Super Bowl.
I came up and was a first-round draft pick and there was a lot of hype and a lot of expectation, and I enjoyed that. Have I also seen the other side of that? Absolutely.