I can speak volumes about the guy sitting next to me. You look at his stat line tonight, he had a lot of foul trouble and didn't really get going, but when he was in there, he was defending. He was playing physical, and he was doing everything he could to help us win.
Some of us are taught to ask for help. Some of us don't feel comfortable asking for help. Some of us will get into trouble because we don't want to share things with adults - maybe because we're used to getting in trouble. I have two daughters, and they're very different from each other. One will tell me everything. The other barely tells me anything at all. Who do I worry about the most? I worry about the quiet one. But it's something I wish I had had when I was a child, that feeling of having someone I could ask for help.
When you first come in the league as a big man, they tell you to be physical down there. No layups, all that kind of stuff. So you have to buy into it, because you think it's going to get you more playing time. But it really just gets you more foul trouble.
There was a lot that was tricky about playing with [Thelonious Monk]. It's a musical language where there's really no lyrics. It's something you feel and you're hearing. It's like an ongoing conversation. You really had to listen to this guy. Cause he could play the strangest tempos, and they could be very in-between tempos on some of those compositions. You really had to listen to his arrangements and the way he would play them. On his solos, you'd really have to listen good in there. You'd have to concentrate on what you were doing as well.
Honest to God, for me, I've never been a guy to stack projects. A lot of these other guys, they like to do this and then line up what they're doing next and line up what they're doing next. I just can't do it.
Yeah, I'm a physical kind of guy. I've always liked being physical. It takes a stuntman to really say, 'Look, we don't want you to do this. No, no, I'm serious, you're not going to do this' to get me not to do my stuff.
I do everything by hand... Even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is.
You fouled a guy who needs to be fouled. If he's going to the basket, you don't give a knick-knack foul and then argue with the ref. You foul him so he knows, so the next guy coming behind him knows, so his team knows you can't go in the lane.
One night a guy hit his head on a welding gun. He went to his knees. He was bleeding like a pig, blood was oozing out. So I stopped the line for a second and ran over to help him. The foreman turned the line on again, he almost stepped on the guy. That's the first thing they always do. They didn't even call an ambulance. The guy walked to the medic department -- that's about half a mile -- he had about five stitches put in his head. The foreman didn't say anything. He just turned the line on. You're nothing to any of them.
Look, don’t get me wrong. I worship the ground this guy walks on. I’m excited to meet him tonight. I’m dying to meet him tonight. If he wanted to carry me off and make me his love slave, I’d do it, so long as I got advance copies of his books.
I may not know everything about physical talent or anything like that, but I have a sharp mind when it comes to that look: being able to look into somebody's eyes to tell if they are going to be in the foxhole with you tonight, or if they are not.
I could barely speak after I was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers. I was going to play for the defending Super Bowl champions.... I immediately thought of all the great players on the team. I was in awe, as I had watched these soon-to-be legends play on television. They epitomized for me what football was all about: the love of the game, the professional approach, and the desire to win.
Mental health, for me, is doing everything I can to help this team win. Sitting around not doing anything isn't something I've been too big on since I was young.
All the stats don't mean a thing if we don't get the win. The most important stat is the win. Nothing else really matters if you don't get the win.
Once after Barefoot In the Park had been playing for about a week I went back to see it, watching the audience, which was just falling over laughing except for one guy sitting the aisle. I was transfixed. I said to myself, there seems to be no way to get to him. No one else would I watch except this one man. My wife joined me about 20 minutes later and asked me how it was going, and I said, terrible. I really meant it. There was no way to get to this man. It destroyed me.
The trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. If manipulators really had the powers claimed, they could win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science.
There's always going to be a lot of distractions in the NFL - that's just how it is; it's on the biggest stage - but really focusing on what I have to do now to help my team win, help me be at my best physically when I'm out there on the field and mentally, because that will ultimately help my team no matter what role I'm playing.