Basketball should be more popular. In my opinion, the NBA should rival the NFL. At the very least, no way should the NFL be five times more popular than the NBA.
This is totally unexpected. I thought I'd be in the NBA or the NFL. I never thought baseball. It's kind of like a surprise. I'm happy it happened.
I'm the NBA's best NFL player, and I've always been the sexiest 7-footer in the NBA - for 12 years running.
Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of being paid like NBA, NFL and soccer and baseball athletes. They have that cushion where they can kind of hang out. Even the guys on the bench. But for us, we don't fight, we don't get paid and that's the scary reality to it all.
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.
From watching the draft and following the NFL closely, anything can happen in the draft. But to me, it's not where I get drafted that matters to me, to be completely honest.
With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.
Tennis is interesting. I feel, in terms of stats and stuff, maybe we're a little bit behind the curve, especially me just coming to the States and seeing stats used for, obviously, NFL, NBA, et cetera. Especially in baseball, there's stats galore.
NFL, NBA, they all have off-seasons. Wrestling doesn't have an off-season. We're on the road 209 days out of the year, performing in different cities every single night.
Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.
College is so different from the NBA. You have three guys coming at you and trapping all over the place, and NBA is different. There's more space.
We just have fun with our NFL Draft coverage because we understand that it's a long process, and there can be technical glitches that we don't profess to ignore. During our late coverage of the Draft, we sometimes get slap-happy and distort the heads of our analysts.
The NFL has a hard cap, but if you ask 20 NFL experts who is going to win the Super Bowl this year, you might get 20 different answers. If you then asked 20 baseball experts who is going to represent the American League in the World Series, at least 90 percent of them would say the Yankees and the rest would say Seattle.
It was even hard to imagine I was going to play in the NBA, because so many guys playing in Europe are not even getting to the Euroleague and everything. But everybody wants to play in the NBA. So when draft night came, it was a dream come true.
Speaking on all of it in general, I think we, as MMA fighters, should be getting paid just as well as the NBA players, the NFL players and Major League Baseball, hockey as well, I'm not trying to skip any sport as I don't think any sport is superior to the other.
In an unhealthy way, I found a lot of validity in having always been a very good athlete, a very good baseball player, and I've since grown out of that place into a different perspective and learned how to live differently, thankfully, where baseball is certainly something that's very important to me. It's not who I am, though. It's just what I do.