Sports can unite a group of people from different backgrounds, all working together to achieve a common goal. And even if they fall short, sharing that journey is an experience they'll never forget. It can teach some of the most fundamental and important human values: dedication, perseverance, hard work, and teamwork. It also teaches us how to handle our success and cope with our failure. So, perhaps the greatest glory of sport is that is teaches us so much about life itself.

Whether I'm on the road or off the road it's really important for me mentally and physically. Physically, when I'm on the road, I work with men that love to eat - I work with former athletes, with men who love to indulge on the road, so I eat like a guy. I have four appetizers, I try their entrees, I eat mine, I like dessert. So I have to make sure that physically, I try to stay in shape. I'm always doing some sort of a workout, and then mentally it just helps a lot with the stress.

I get questions from Richard Sandomir at the New York Times or Michael Hiestand at USA Today about issues .., 'well, there's a blog site that says you root too hard for the Red Sox. Or people don't like you because you're rooting against their team ...'I don't want to say it's bad. There are certainly things you learn from the internet. You certainly learn from people's opinions. I think you're going to get some of the negative a lot more than the positive, but I think you can learn from it.

Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead... What I believe is, if he [Belcher] didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today... Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.

If Vin Scully calling a game is just as good in 2013 as he was in 1963, that's the way a game should sound. If Jack Buck were around today, I don't think anybody would ask him to change his style. My style has always been a little bit of a combination of old and new, if only because my frame of reference, personally, was different than that of Ernie Harwell or Jack Buck or Harry Caray. I was a younger guy. Just as Joe Buck's frame of reference is somewhat different from mine. But the nuts and bolts of how to call a ballgame well, I think remain the same.

My best career moments have come being a fan first. Because that's why we love sports, and that's why I got into sports - those highs and lows on that roller coaster ride that I don't want to get off - because I enjoy the highs as much as I enjoy the lows. The highs are even better when you experience the lows, and that can apply when rooting for your favorite sports team or your career. It's also important not to get too high or too low, and it's also important not to listen to the noise. You just have to do it for you in those career moments because they're gonna come.

If every university president said, 'The revenue producing sports: basketball, football - potentially revenue producing at most universities - maybe in a few cases women's basketball, if every one of them had a monitor that reported directly to the university president and no 'student-athlete' ever gets into this college or university who could not plausibly be admitted if we did not have a football or basketball team, end of problem. It won't happen because it's like unilaterally disarming. You know your opponent won't do it and then you'll get crushed in every game, but it's a simple thing.

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