In my youth I thought I was going to be a professional rugby player.
At 27 or so I thought, you know, I actually do really want to make money and have a proper life, and I don't want to be a loser. I know! I'll go to university and get a proper degree and maybe get a job in media... I went and did an English degree.
I didn't go to university or get a degree, but I hired somebody as a mentor - and that I considered my university education.
My parents are huge influences on me. My mother was an English teacher. My father played professional rugby and coached rugby for the Irish rugby team.
My loves in life are food, history and rugby. I'd love to be a history professor or a rugby player but I prefer rugby and my career would end by the time I was 30, leaving me enough time to go and study history.
I had dreams of being a professional rugby player.
I've been a professional rugby player all my life; I don't really know anything different.
I think the first thing that I thought I would go and do as a career was be a rugby player. I had a trial with a club and it became very clear, very quickly that that wasn't going to be what I would end up doing. I was far too small and far too much of a lightweight, both mentally and physically, to play rugby at that level.
I had gotten a master's degree in administration supervision with it in mind that I would some day be a professor, then get a doctorate degree and move up and eventually be president of a university.
I'm married to a dear little girl who holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
When I went to school, most parents wanted their children to get good A-levels, to go to university, and get a degree so your children had a better life than you. The way out of poverty was through a degree. But the whole world has moved on from that.
He was a professional rugby player in the area that I played as a youngster. So a lot of people who I went to school with knew who he was and knew that he was black. So I would get racist taunts in school.
It is possible to get a degree in Engineering by merely passing the exams and not really learning the concepts in depth, and also get a job based on that degree. Similarly, a cricketer can waste the opportunities in the nets and in training, and with some talent still play professional cricket.
Ultimately, we are professional rugby people, and we focus on the rugby. That's the easy bit. We are not politicians, so we don't have to delve too much into that.
I wanted to stay in New York to pursue acting, but my dad urged me to get a four-year degree. Reading about the film school at Florida State University, he suggested I go there. I received my bachelor's degree in 2003.
A freshman has only about 25% of his degree completed. They go off to play professional basketball, and to assume they will come back and get the degree done five, six, seven years later, I don't see that happening.