I wanted to be a football player. Football is a sport that I love, but the more I started playing basketball, the more I started dreaming of playing in the NBA.
Free agency screws everybody's allegiances up. Whether it be football, baseball, hockey, basketball, whatever it may be. It's really hard.
I played basketball and soccer my freshman year in high school.
I'm probably not supposed to say this, but the truth is, there were so many times when I thought about quitting basketball, even when I was at Louisville. My freshman year, I shot 18 for 72 from three.
During the season, I'm always locked in one gear, ready to play basketball, always keeping my guard up.
Basketball was not my main sport in grade school, or even the first year of high school.
Guys play basketball and get hurt, and that's probably the easiest sport on the planet. We're actually fighting every day. We're wrestling; we're grappling.
I sort of tried to get a basketball scholarship out of high school, but that didn't happen. Then I started working for UPS, and that paid for tuition for school. I moved to a bigger town, Louisville. I did it for a year. I had to work the graveyard shift. And then you get off at eight for classes, so that sucked. Then I dropped out.
As a child, I was very active. I was a gymnast, I played touch football, netball and basketball. When I was 16 years old, I started yoga. I started working out at an early age.
The walls of our upstairs hallway testify that we once had photogenic children. There are rows of framed pictures that show them playing baseball, basketball, holding a toad, and smiling in the sunlight at their eager parents. Everything is orderly and bright.
The invention of basketball was not an accident. It was developed to meet a need. Those boys simply would not play 'Drop the Handkerchief.'
You need to possess more than a little nastiness to play basketball at the highest level.
I wanted to be a hockey player. Where I grew up, the basketball courts were rarely used. I was terrible in school and actually said, 'I'm going to be a hockey player.'
What I wanted to do in talking about basketball in 'Hoop Roots' was retrieve the game as something to participate in, not to watch.
I grew up playing basketball and eating hot dogs on the corner.
It is a very humbling honor to be selected as a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame.
I grew up in a small town in Illinois, and my dad was a basketball coach. Thanks to him, I have excellent fundamentals in both basketball and baseball.
I was recruited by every school in the country for football and basketball. And an incident happened in high school, and all that was taken away. No other teams, no other schools were recruiting me anymore.
Basketball is so unique. It's both a team and an individual sport.
I grew up playing basketball in the inner city of Seattle, and by the time I was a senior, I earned a full scholarship to the University of Denver.