Chick Hearn was my favorite broadcaster ever - he's the one who taught me to think basketball, how to love basketball.
I went from thinking, 'I wonder if I can be a broadcaster. Will anybody give me a chance? Maybe I can get a shot at it,' to thinking, 'Man, I want to do this for a long time.'
It never occurred to me that I was important enough to have some politician go out of his way to silence me. I only found out about it in the '80s by accident - a broadcaster announced they received letters of commendation from the White House for having suppressed my music. My career was so highly impacted in the U.S. it will never recover.
There's broadcasters that make me enjoy what I'm seeing because of their energy and how they explain what's happening and paint that picture.
For me, the main principle for broadcasters has to be that if people stand to benefit from an interview, they should be prepared to face some downside as well.
Broadcasters realise there is a large percentage of women that watch cricket and it was the Caribbean Premier League that first got me to commentate a men's international T20.
Since 1981, I've spent every Thanksgiving Day broadcasting a game, and it is one of my favorite days. You can say, 'Woe is me, I never get to be part of the tradition,' or you can say, 'Heck, we've got our own tradition, and it's pretty good.'
The only reason I got into broadcasting was, I needed money to pay for my junior and senior years at college, and they hired me, those fools!
I had fun pretending to be a sportscaster. People always think that was a down thing for me. I had the best job in sports broadcasting for two years.
Whenever I'm trying to decide how to spend my precious time, energy, or money, I ask myself a series of questions. 'Will this broaden or deepen my relationships?' 'Will this contribute to an atmosphere of growth in my life?' 'Is this a way to 'Be Gretchen?' and 'Will this help connect me to my past?'
I'm not much of a chef, so people keep buying me cookery books to broaden my culinary horizons, but I've not got far past shepherd's pie yet.
I made friends with a boy who was a communist when I was 13 and that broadened my political views, but it also brought me into conflict with my father who was very Right-wing.
And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.
But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.
You ask what my conclusions are, rereading my journals and looking back on World War II from the vantage point of quarter century in time? We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense, it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.
I've consciously taken on material that's a bit too much for me but not an overreach. The first movie, just about performances. 'The Town,' I learned how to work broader material, develop tension, direct bigger scenes, action sequences. 'Argo,' I experimented with film stock, widened the scope of my geography.
I struggled for a while, but when I was cast in an Off Broadway show called 'Once Upon a Mattress,' that kind of put me on the map.
I was in California, and I was going to UCLA, and I knew I certainly didn't have movie star looks. I remember seeing pictures and photos of Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, who were kind of average looking. I said, 'Well, that's for me, then, to go back to New York and try to be in musical comedy on Broadway.'
If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn't work, you're a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn't sound great to me!
But as far as dream roles - I know this is so expected of me, but I would to play Elphaba in 'Wicked' on Broadway. I have a lot of dream roles, but that's like my main one because of the vocal track. I love belting high things!
