When you play professionally, you get accustomed to turnover. Players come and go - they get injured, they get transferred, they get cut from the team. Coaches are hired, and coaches are fired. It's just part of the world you live in.
What I know is that if you're going to play half-court, you'd better have the greatest executioners of half-court basketball. If you run, you test the stamina and willpower of the other team. That's what I learned as a player.
My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.
When you're younger, it's about, 'How can I get better? How can I become the player that I want to be?' As you get older, it's, 'How can this football team improve?' While all along getting better along the way.
In the end, it's about the teaching, and what I always loved about coaching was the practices. Not the games, not the tournaments, not the alumni stuff. But teaching the players during practice was what coaching was all about to me.
I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.
I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. No matter what the injury - unless it's completely debilitating - I'm going to be the same player I've always been. I'll figure it out. I'll make some tweaks, some changes, but I'm still coming.
When I got my first Marshall amp, it was so empowering. No one ever forgets their first Marshall amp if you're a guitar player pursuing a big powerful sound. I mean, no one ever forgets their first Marshall amp.
You're a professional. You don't need for me to break a film down for you. If you want to stop the guy you're playing, they pay you millions of dollars. You get you a TV and break the player down yourself.
The 'Maybe Memories' album I remember having and listening until it broke. I remember it skipped one day; two or three songs wouldn't play on my CD player because I listened to it so much.
There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire...
I've always been very interested in the struggle for human rights, not just here but abroad, and I wanted to be an inside player in that struggle. I wanted to make the laws reflect our ideals and ideas in this democracy that is America.
So it's more the musician in me that makes me stretch out and try different things more than anything. But, like a lot of guitar players, I have one certain niche that's my thing that I'm better at than the others.
I've always been the DJ or the bass player or the drummer, somebody in the background. I don't think anybody who knows me personally would say that I'm particularly shy or introverted, but I'm definitely not like Mr. Attention.
Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.
Like I said, a 30-year-old hockey player, even when I came to New York when I was 30, I was on the downside of my career, pretty much the end of my career.
Of course I have the odd bad game like other players. But I can't accept that. Especially when things don't go right for United. It all means so much to me to be succesful here. It drives me crazy at times.
I don't like to compare clubs or players from way back. It's different today. Your ballparks are better. In the days when I played, we had eight teams in each league. Now you have more.
As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that's what I do, too.
I was taught coming up in the Phillies organization to be seen and not heard by people like Pete Rose, my hero growing up, and players like Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and Manny Trillo.
My earliest professional musical experiences were really as a session player, and every day was an adventure. Three sessions a day, every day, and you never knew who you would be working with until you arrived at the studio.
