You gotta try something people ain't seen before, and you gotta go to the gym and work on your dunks. In a slam dunk competition, don't show up with three dunks. You got to have eight or nine dunks because if you get into the finals and two guys may do the same dunk or one guy does the dunk better than the other.
There's part of it when Manute has both eyes. And the character was actually fleshed out a lot more, in this movie. I got to show people who Manute is and why he is and how devout he is. He is Ava's protector and punisher.
I'm taller than Manute. I don't know if he's shrunk, or I've grown or whatnot, but we measured up side to side, and I'm taller. I don't think Manute's 7-7. I don't think he's barely 7-6.
Manute Bol was one of the guys who taught me to be bold. To be fierce. To speak intelligently, and speak like you belong.
If a European guy came to Africa and said hey guys, you don't have good - people could tell him to go to hell. You are an imperialist. You are a colonialist. Who are the hell are you to come and tell us what to do? I'm an African. Whatever I say nobody in Africa tell me well, it's not of your business. It is my business.
Friends tell each other what nobody else is willing to tell you.
I know that for category purposes, people have to lump certain artists in with genre that they make their name or their bones in. Nobody can tell me that Taj Mahal is pure blues. Nobody can tell me that Mike Bloomfield was pure blues. It was a lot of other things going on as well.
Africans are not as tall as northern Europeans. But Manute Vol and other sports figures in basketball and football receive a lot of press coverage.
I try to take a couple of young guys under my wing and tell them what I've learned, because you can't teach nobody if you don't know anything.
Some guys don't have to work out as hard as other guys do, but if you balance all that together then your longevity is definitely going to be greater. So, I would tell my 20-year-old self not to over-train.
I wanted to be a complete player, and I felt like the dunks started to overshadow other parts of my game.
When people tell me to do a clean show, I'm like, 'Guys, I don't even understand your thoughts anymore.' What, you can't say a curse word? Nobody thinks that way!
If I were to tell you that my day was all pure wrestling, I wouldn't be honest with you. Because there were crooked promoters. There were a lot of guys that knew that they couldn't even compete with other guys. But to suggest that every match was like that wouldn't be true.
When you think about the guys who started Twitter, and the Google guys, and the Facebook guys and the Napster guys, and the Microsoft guys, and the Dell guys and the Instagram guys, it's all guys. The girls, they're being left behind.
You've got to want to play defence. Nobody really wants to play defence. It's boring. It sucks. You don't get the flashiness, the scores, the dunks. But you've got to have it.
I'm just a guy drawing comics. Guys knocking other guys through buildings. Guys flipping tanks over on each other. I'm just trying to be true to what I liked as a kid.