When you have a background in combat sports, people think you're this martial arts expert, but really I'm just a guy who is able to do certain things without making a mess of himself.

Don't force your kids into sports. I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It's the child's desire to play that matters, not the parent's desire to have the child play. Fun. Keep it fun.

Money was never the motivation. It never should be in sports.

Three events. Three gold medals. I was news, big news, in the sports world.

Life magazine ran a page featuring me and three other girls that was clearly the precursor of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues.

The newspapers loved pinup pictures of pretty young swimmers, and as a national champion, I got more than my share of space in the sports pages.

Sports nurtures dreams of achieving self confidence and masculine striving for the skinny kid watching a boxer dance around the ring with sublime ease.

Sports don't define us; it is not what we live for.

People here don't identify themselves by their sports team.

I'm not really interested in sports psychology. It makes me feel like a crazy person.

To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It's great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don't believe that.

I think life is sort of like a competition, whether it's in sports, or it's achieving in school, or it's achieving good relationships with people. And competition is a little bit of what it's all about.

I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures.

The other thing is this industry has decided it only has one market. Unlike any other industry in the world, unlike film or books or sports even, this industry has decided it has only one market and that's 14 year old boys.

The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures.