Americans have a profound longing for heroes - now perhaps more than ever. We need our explorers, our sports icons, our Medal of Freedom winners, our Nobel laureates. We need our Greatest Generation warriors, our 'Sully' Sullenbergers, our Neil Armstrongs. On some level, we still subscribe to the myth of the man in the white hat.
My three children played soccer and lacrosse. I grew up as a Green Bay Packers fan. I am not against sports. We want kids to play sports, but we want them to be safe.
You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.
Let's face it. There is no setup in Pakistan to train and groom young players at the grassroots level in different sports. Those of us who did make a name for ourselves and became champions did it with our own initiative - there was no academy to back us till we reached a certain level on our own.
The NFL is the only sport where you can be on a team five years, and your contract's not guaranteed. You can go through the whole process of training camp, and then as soon as it's the season, it's a week-to-week job, and they can cut you at any moment, or you can get hurt at any moment. It's not like that in other sports.
I was a gymnast for 13 years, so I was heavy into sports.
Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.
One of sports journalism's great ironies is that covering an Olympics can be wildly unhealthy. NBC shows athletes in peak health performing on the ice and snow, but not the haggard reporters subsisting for three weeks on stadium starches, cheap beer, deadlines, and little sleep.
Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.
I am a sports fanatic and being able to perform at halftime for the fans of the Steelers and the Jets is such a thrill for me.
Things that are unique and rare will cost a lot of money. Houses in East Hampton and Malibu will cost a lot of money because there just aren't that many of them. The value of sports has appreciated because it's the only thing that people have to watch live.
I've been involved with sports my whole life, which made clothes and makeup and handbags not that important as a kid. I just didn't care.
These are my new shoes. They're good shoes. They won't make you rich like me, they won't make you rebound like me, they definitely won't make you handsome like me. They'll only make you have shoes like me. That's it.
I was a big sports fan, and I had been closely monitoring Hank Aaron's home run totals since I was a kid playing on the sandlot adjacent to the Foundry and Machine Company in Batavia, Illinois.
There were only 75 people in my graduating class at the school I attended in Hannah, S.C. It was a small school and that translated into not a lot of opportunities when it came to music. We had academic and sports programs but we never had a consistent music program. We would have a band one year, and a chorus one year, but nothing ever lasted.
When there were first rumors of us going after LeBron, some fans wondered how we could do that after all that happened. But after the 'Sports Illustrated' letter, every fan is thrilled to have him back. That was so heartfelt.
When I was 40, my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn't play tennis. I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again.
I did a severe amount of plays in high school. I was in every single show that my drama club produced. Then in the summer I would do plays, and I was also playing sports. I was probably a hellish kid, come to think of it, for my parents' schedule. But then I went to college in North Carolina.
This is one of the last unique things to do in the business of sports, to return the National Football League to the city of Los Angeles. I happen to love the city of Los Angeles; I happen to love the NFL - and to somehow be a part of that, a helper in that process, is something I've always been interested in.
In sports, I refused to do any interviews that were just going to become human-interest stories. Don't turn me into a tragic heroine.
