A Quote by Russell Latapy

I was a 21-year-old kid back then and I had my whole career in front of me. We were so close to reaching the World Cup and then we all woke up the next morning to realize our dreams had been dashed.
We were so happy to be alive. There was a motel there pretty close. We had a big cup of coffee. Everybody had a room to themselves. But nobody wanted to go to bed. Everybody wanted to stay up and drink coffee and have doughnuts. We had made it. The weather was perfect when we woke up the next morning.
We had a party with the rest of the skaters in our trailer and then the next day we were off to see Jimmy Carter. And then we had the World Championships the next weekend, so not a lot of chance to catch up.
I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.
And just when I thought the pain had dulled, my mind would betray me and bring Dad back to life in my dreams. Sometimes I didn't realize that he was dead until I awoke and then it was like a punch in the stomach. And sometimes I knew in my dream that I was dreaming, and I woke up crying.
Most of the crew were staying in Monaco. But my family and I were actually staying in Nice because I had my whole family there and we wanted a little more space and to stay in a hotel. The truth is we were asleep [when the attack Bastille Day terror happened] and woke up the next morning to it and it was obviously horrific. And then the idea of going out and filming, it just felt so stupid to be working the next day and pretending that everything's cool when you're making some frivolous thing.
I remember this one time I had a dream about me writing a screenplay, and when I woke up, you know those dreams that feel so real, but I woke up and I was like, 'Oh my god I have this amazing screenplay I need to write down as soon as I wake up' and then I woke up and I was like what the heck was I dreaming of?
I had a lot of bad jobs but the one big internship I had is I interned for 'SNL' when I was 21 years old and that was the joke. You intern there and you think man, I'm going to be with the writers and the great comedians. Then you're getting everybody sandwiches and then the doors close and then all the great creatives are doing the work.
When I woke up from that dream, brother, I was like, "Okay, I've got to know what that was, what happened." That was not an average dream. I've had some dreams in my days, but not like that. It was way too vivid. Looking back, the reason that dream makes more sense today than it did then is, we are in a digital world. Back then, it was an analog world. Everything was digital in the dream.
I came into having an artist's career in this very sheepish and directionless way. It's hard to explain, but I was 18 years old and I was ready to go to college; that was the next step for me. Then suddenly I had a song that blew up... and I had this artist's career and I was on tour with these big names and I didn't know what I was doing.
The school I went to was a little farm school in Wannaska, student body 61 or something. There was a kid, the only black kid in our county, Dustin Byfuglien. He won the Stanley Cup a couple years back with the Blackhawks. Out of a class of 21 kids, he and I always had to be on opposite teams on everything because we were the most athletic.
If I were involved with the NBA, I wouldn't want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I've been watching on another team, and now he's 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid.
Our whole family had been sports oriented. My dad had played a lot of semipro but never had any opportunity to do anything with it. Back then, he had to make a living.
When I woke the next morning in my room at White's Motel, I showered and stood naked in front of the mirror, watching myself solemnly brush my teeth. I tried to feel something like excitement but came up only with a morose unease. Every now and then I could see myself-truly see myself-and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was 'the woman with the hole in her heart'. That was me.
Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
It would make me a lot happier if I could meet up again next year with as many friends as possible from all over the world who I've met during my career. That's where the great opportunity lies, for me personally, in our role as World Cup host.
Sometimes I would come back from a run, and my artificial leg would have a puddle of blood from my stump. I wouldn't go to sick bay. In that year, if I had gone to sick bay, they would have written me up. I didn't go to sick bay. I'd go somewhere and hide and soak my leg in a bucket of hot water with salt in it--an old remedy. Then I'd get up the next morning and run.
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