The more minutes you play and the more grind and physical play you endure through the course of a season, you have to re-charge and get your body right for the next season. Be in that weight room and conditioning and that kind of deal.

I was acting when I was playing baseball.

Football is unconditional love.

If you watch me during the game, I celebrate when we press the ball and it goes out.

To be able to finish opportunities that I do get in the paint, that makes a difference.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

Winning the title in England is the biggest challenge of them all.

Bobby Knight told me this: ‚There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense.‘ In other words a good offense wins.

I try to encourage all my teammates, and I sure hope that some day all athletes – my kids, high school kids – get the same level of care I get. Because you can play for a long period of time without having knee replacements, without having all the major head trauma that people are dealing with.

Maybe the ones burning my jersey were never LeBron fans anyway.

Nothing surprises me anymore in the NFL.

My main focus is always to do well on the field for the Indian cricket team. When people say good things about me off the field, I am more than happy to accept them.

I really want a movie made on Sachin Tendulkar’s life. That is something I’m looking forward to. There will be so much emotion to that movie.

All my life, I’ve been trying to make a hole-in-one. The closest I’ve come is a bogey.

I don’t want to be called a point guard, but I can’t stop it.

On the court, I want to try and get to the free-throw line a little more. And as a point guard, you can always get better at your decision-making and limiting your mistakes.

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.

I expected to be a pretty good NBA point guard and hopefully win a championship. But MVP and all this stuff? Not really.

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

I know what I do for my team and what my teammates expect of me on both ends of the floor.

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.

An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame – Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.

I know my serve stinks, but I was a pretty good tennis player.

I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

I plan on taking athletics as far as I can.

My uncle played rugby, and my dad played football, and they used to argue which game was the roughest – and everybody agreed rugby was. It’s a great team sport, and to be successful, every person has to play in the same level.

We all know what flopping is when we see it. The stuff that you see is where guys aren’t really getting hit at all and are just flailing around like a fish out of water.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

I would not like to be the only woman on the court.

I have certain guys who I looked up to. Jordan, Kobe, those guys. Passing that on to doing my part to kind of keep that influence of basketball where it should be is kind of why I play the game.

I focus on one thing and one thing only – that’s trying to win as many championships as I can.

My first win feels better than a draw!

I swim like a fish and I have an amazing kick.

If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

The worst thing is for a player to come to a club and not be able to play.

I was totally dominated and revered my father. I admired everything he did. He was a great sports person. He loved me. I was his only boy at that time, before my brother Billy came along.

I love watching track and field – the 4×100 relay, the 100-(meter) dash, the 200-(meter) dash. To see what they’re able to do, I love watching that.

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.

Even if soccer is not number one in the United States, they do things very well here. There’s much our country can learn from the U.S.A., because we all know that soccer is not the main game in India. We can still do more things, like provide better facilities for the players so they can perform well.

One reason I don’t want to play in England again is because we don’t have any personalities.

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

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

If someone told me I could play two Asian Cup finals, I wouldn’t have believed it.

You know, I’m trying to chase rings, and that’s all I’m about. So that’s where the conversation stops for me.

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.

In England, football is a big thing to talk about, but Liverpool, it’s a special place. You feel it when you make your first step.

The bat is not a toy, it’s a weapon. It gives me everything in life, which helps me to do everything on the field.

I rate Fabien Barthez and played with two great keepers in Alex Stepney and Harry Gregg.

All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill.

As a kid, I used to see how Sachin Tendulkar used to win matches under pressure for India in Sharjah or other places. So I was always keen to repeat the same in similar situations. I don’t take pressure on myself when I am in the middle. I love pressure, and I always believe that pressure makes you more focused.

I am pretty chill before games. Have a go-to routine that keeps me busy until we are ready to take the court so I’m not just sitting around anxious for the game.

What the ISL has done is create the hype and buzz around football that it very badly needs.

In 1962 I was named Minor League Player of the Year. It was my second season in the bigs.

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

Taking in a baseball game on TV is also a big treat.

David Beckham has never impressed me.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

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.