At home I have a copy of the April 21, 1986, issue of 'Sports Illustrated.' I'm on the cover with the blurb, 'Can Lou Do It?' I'd just arrived at Notre Dame, and with spring football underway, I was the focal point of that week's coverage.
Traveling is definitely something that your average 17-year-old doesn't get to do. One week we're in Japan, one week we're in Australia, one week we're back home going to football games.
The simplest way to win in the National Football League is to knock out the starting quarterback. You know, throughout the years, history has proven if your number one quarterback goes down, your chances for success become very limited.
When I'm in town on Sundays, I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.
My favorite memories were with my dad, throwing a football around when he came home from work. As long as kids are having fun, that's the biggest deal at the end of the day.
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.
I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was twelve years old I wrote reports on local football matches for the newspapers.
My memories are of my dad taking me to football on Saturday mornings, and my mum taking me swimming. Those are the things I remember from my childhood, not sitting around the table debating capitalism and the profit squeeze.
My dad shaped the footballing side of me, and Mum shaped me as a person. I've always been very close to her - we've only ever had one argument, and that was over something stupid when I was 13.
I'm from Santa Cruz in Northern California, and the 49ers were my dad and I's bonding time. We would go to games in the '80s. It was a good time to fall in love with football when your team was unstoppable.
Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered.
In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.
Football is such a team sport, so no one individual does it. No one coach or no one assistant coach or no one player, it's a great team sport, so I don't get carried away with a bunch of accolades.
I just read 'The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.' To be married 25 years, you have to put as much energy as I put into being an actor or being a great football player into being a better husband and a better father.
We were younger. And it's basically like looking at football classics. You see things that you did, you see things that you could've done better and you think about all the good relationships that you had with the cast.
A lot of people say you always come back to what you are good at. Football has been 25 years of my life, so maybe I'll come back to it in some sort of way.
I'm not trying to be the highest-paid receiver in the National Football League. I've never received that, and that's not ever going to happen. So I'm fine with what I have, I make good money, and I'm happy about it.
The trouble is that right now I want to put as much work into football as I can. It's very important for me to get off to a good start. By the same token, I feel a responsibility to handle the media and those sort of things.
Not to be narcissistic, but I truly believe in order to make yourself better, you should see what you did before and what was good about that and what wasn't - same way a football team plays a game and then they go back and watch film.
Al Michaels is a good announcer. I think Keith Jackson is a terrific announcer. I always loved him on Monday Night Football. I never understood why they got rid of him.
It is like football with coaches, like, 'We're only going to think about the next game.' It is really true, all you think is, 'Okay, we have to make a good next episode.'
