Every season is a new challenge to me, and I always set out to improve in terms of games, goals, assists.

I’m not going to lie; listen, I’m nice at basketball.

I don’t think there is anything wrong in earning money from the sport you love. If you work hard and get benefits from it, there is no harm. The day you feel that you are not working hard and are only looking at the benefits, that’s where the problem is.

Football is big business – you can’t get away from it. But you have to separate that side from the playing.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

It obviously bothers people when Real Madrid win. It makes them jealous. There isn’t a level playing field.

I can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn’t very entertaining for me.

I have goals.

At the start of the season, there are 16 teams in the top division looking behind them, making sure they avoid relegation. The fear starts in the boardroom, comes down to managers and through to players. The fans sense it.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

Everybody asks if putting is like shooting free throws. It has a very similar kind of mindset. And it’s just you, the ball, and the target.

It was a personal decision for me to stand and say that cricket is all I have in life, there’s nothing I need to do other than cricket. If I want to achieve whatever I thought as a kid, I need to work hard and not let it go to waste.

When I am playing baseball, I give it all that I have on the ball field. When the ball game is over, I certainly don’t take it home. My little girl who is sitting out there wouldn’t know the difference between a third strike and a foul ball. We don’t talk about baseball at home.

I’m a football fan, a sports fan, a fan of competition.

My grandfather was one of the very, very first, if not the first, Samoan wrestlers to become known on a worldwide basis.

I was so used to going out and winning state championships and playing in the postseason.

There’s not much time to unwind, but you know what, it’s because I love what I do. I look forward to the season. I look forward to playing games. It doesn’t ever feel like work.

It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

I am very happy to be signing for the best team in the world and especially proud to be the first Portuguese player to join United.

I don’t know who I would have been if I never watched MotoGP.

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.

I was scared many times on Everest, but this is all part of the challenge. When I fell down a crevasse, it was pretty scary.

Winning, to me, is easy. Winning more is the challenge.

Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.

Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.

Basketball is booming, and it’s not just an Under Armour standpoint: it’s about the game itself. Kids going out and playing and being inspired by what we do on the court.

You can’t get too much winter in the winter.

Nothing recedes like progress.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.

The same thing I did in 2013 is what I’m trying to do in 2014, which is continue to improve, continue to shock people. You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I’ll have another hour of stand-up material where I’ll be able to go on the road and tour again.

Football coaches don’t have real problems.

I noticed that when I touched the ball on the field, you could hear this shrill noise in the crowd with all the birds screaming like at a Beatles concert.

A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships.

There is a place in the net where the keeper cannot reach the ball.

Fighting football, not serenity football – that is what I like.

I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head – big darkness, soon come – but every once in a while you get a fair chance to have it both ways, and the annual NCAA basketball Tournament is one of them.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

My game is really played above time. I don’t say that like I’m saying I’m ahead of my time. I’m saying, like, if I’m on the court and I throw a pass, the ball that I’ve thrown will lead my teammate right where he needs to go, before he even knows that that’s the right place to go to.

I think my top salary was maybe in 1966. I made $17,000 and 11 of that came from selling other players‘ equipment.

I was the one who took football off the back pages and put it on to page one.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

Make sure of your commitment to Jesus Christ, and seek to follow Him every day. Don’t be swayed by the false values and goals of this world, but put Christ and His will first in everything you do.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

As a professional athlete a lot is going to be said about you – but I just try to move forward and try to achieve my goals.

My measure of success is whether I’m fulfilling my mission.

Nothing extraordinary happens to a cricketer if you time his career – which is very short.

Every night on the court I give my all, and if I’m not giving 100 percent, I criticize myself.

Golf without bunkers and hazards would be tame and monotonous. So would life.

Ordinarily, players fine-tune their match-fitness during the pre-season.

If Tiger Woods had played football, he would have been a quarterback.

You can make a board for all the goals you want in your life with the pictures on it, and that’s great, daydreaming is wonderful, but you can never plan your future.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

In college, a loss is pretty devastating. That feeling kind of goes away in an 82-game season. You hate to lose, but you also have a lot more games to make up for it.

You might not always get what you want, but you always get what you expect.

I used to rush home to see ‚Match Of The Day.‘ Whatever I was doing, I wouldn’t miss it.

When I’m ready to fight, my opponent has a better chance of surviving a forest fire wearing gasoline drawers.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.