A Quote by C. J. McCollum
I ended up switching over to journalism in college. A few weeks into freshman year, I realized that business school wasn't for me. And writing stories and reading and talking to people is something that I just enjoy doing, so I figured why not try to build up a post-basketball career with that.
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I hated the culture, I hated the work. I very quickly realized that this wasn't what I wanted to do. So, after two years, I took some writing courses - I always loved to write - and I figured the only way I was going to get paid to write was in journalism. I really wasn't very involved politically with anything up until that point. Then I started reading about the second Palestinian Intifada, and I spoke to friends in activist and journalism circles. Then, somehow by complete luck, I ended up at Democracy Now.
The short version is that I started an internet diary a long, long time ago (six years!) because I was bored with my job. I figured I would write a few funny things a few times a week until I had enough material to do stand-up. After two or three weeks, I emailed it to some friends. They emailed it to other friends, and more people started reading. Eventually, I realized that stand-up was scary and it would be much easier to just keep writing this stuff at work.
I ended up in college by accident. Everything in my life, I ended up in by accident. I was down south in this high school doing whatever. It could just not contain me. I quit school and took off and traveled around. Nobody knew where I was I just couldn't handle it anymore. It was a big scandal, I was gone. I left.
I've been No. 12 my entire career. My cousin Nikki Haerling was a good basketball player, she wore No. 12 in high school and college, and my dad, he was No. 12 as well. I actually just started wearing it when I got to high school my freshman year.
When I was 13, tennis became more of my life. It's when I gave up skiing, I gave up winter sports. I still played varsity basketball my freshman year of high school - basketball was the last sport I gave up for my tennis.
I got hurt my senior year of college. I ended up breaking my fifth metatarsal after I pulled out of the Draft. That was a good experience for me to kind of find myself, figure out a plan for post-basketball because obviously it doesn't last forever.
My baseball career ended in college.I played on the freshman team, but was becoming more drawn to intellectualism than athleticism, and so I gave up baseball, and it was perfect timing because baseball was going to give up me very soon.
My dad and my brother took me over to England a few times to train with various clubs. My brother basically ended up sending a CD to a few clubs of me playing football. That seems like a long time ago now, but it ended up signing for Reading.
I got kicked out of high school, went to 3 different high schools and summer school and extra night school just so I could maybe graduate and try to make it up, because I flunked pretty much my entire freshman year, mainly because I just never showed up.
Every time I do a movie, I'm reading the script, or if it's something I have coming up, I'm reading the script, and I just spend hours and hours and days and weeks and months going over the script and just writing a lot of different ideas down, finding a little dialogue or just coming up with ideas for scenes and moments and all that kind of stuff.
My freshman year of high school, I started wrestling, and I ended up loving it more than anything I'd ever done.
At the time, I was reading this Miles Davis book, and he was talking about coming to New York right after he was in high school. It kind of made me feel like, "Yeah." I didn't want to go to college; I wanted to do stand-up. And I figured, "What's the point of doing stand-up around DC? I'm always going to be under-appreciated there because I started there." I felt like I was strong enough and unique enough that I should give it a big leash to shine. New York was the best thing that ever happened to me as a comedian.
When I got to college, my sister was starting work, and she realized she had two weeks of vacation a year, so she called me and said, 'Go abroad.' So right after my freshman year, I went and I studied in Guatemala, and I studied in Kenya, and I studied in Italy, and it was incredible.
I'd been in journalism about two weeks when I realized I would do just about anything to avoid writing, and over the years, I have.
In high school, I was one of the cofounders of New Kids on the Block my freshman year in high school. But I also started studying theatre in high school my freshman year as well. So throughout high school, I was actually doing both.
I always say that, to me, it starts with reading. This is something I tell high school kids, college kids, people trying to get into the business, that it's just so much about reading. Read, read, read. So much of everything else falls into place when you just do a ton of reading.
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