On the tennis court, one needs a cool temperament, tremendous ball sense, reflexes, speed, hand-eye co-ordination, power, timing and peak physical fitness. Off the court, the player and support team need skills in planning, execution, travel, an ability to raise funds when needed, and several other talents.

When the others grew tired and went home and there was no one else to play with I used to play my own Test matches on the porch of our house, using a broom handle or a stick as the bat and a marble as the ball. I would arrange the pot plants to represent fielders and try to find the gaps as I played my shots.

The main thing is confidence. I'm gaining more and more confidence to do whatever I want to do on the basketball court, whether it is shooting threes or sprinting to the rim and finishing or ball handling. I'm confident enough because I have worked on it that I am going to do the exact same things in the game.

My first and only experience in baseball, the coach signed me up; he didn't tell me there's a thing called the curveball. I didn't know that. So the ball's coming at me and I start backing out, and then it broke inside. And the umpire says, 'Strike one!' And I'm saying, 'How is that a strike? It almost hit me!'

When I stepped into the box, I felt the at-bat belonged to me. Everybody else was there for my convenience. The pitcher was there to throw me a ball to hit. The catcher was there to throw it back to him if he didn't give me what I wanted the first time. And the umpire was lucky that he was close enough to watch.

I've always liked taking the ball out of defence and I will carry on doing that but at the end of the day I'm a defender, and that's what I want to be known as - a defender, getting in the blocks and the headers that people don't recognise I do, the dirty stuff that every defender should do and should be good at.

I think we judge talent wrong. What do we see as talent? I think I have made the same mistake myself. We judge talent by people's ability to strike a cricket ball. The sweetness, the timing. That's the only thing we see as talent. Things like determination, courage, discipline, temperament, these are also talent.

Part of me goes back to being 8 years old and going on the train 45 minutes to wait at a bank to get Ernie Banks' autograph. Or when I was a ball boy, becoming best buddies with some of the undrafted or late-drafted guys, them becoming like our big brothers, and then the pain of cut day and watching them get cut.

What I feel for the ball, what I enjoy, as a player and now as a coach, the satisfaction I feel when I see great players, is the same as in the school playground: seeing moves build, seeing understanding, passes flow, seeing it all fit together. That's what I admire and ultimately, that's what you learn at school.

Trade shows such as the wire tappers' ball are highly secretive and ban journalists from attending. None of the U.S. agencies that attended the wire tappers' ball - including the FBI, the Secret Service, and every branch of the military - were willing to comment when a reporter queried them about their attendance.

My hair grows into a fuzz ball - I just wanted it to grow downwards rather than outwards - but then I realized I couldn't play guitar with it that way. I couldn't do anything day-to-day without my hair getting in my mouth or my eyes or my food, so I just started tying it back, long before I knew what a man bun was.

Fame is a funny thing. I like doing normal things. I like going to fairs. I like going to ball games. I like going to Disney World or a big field on the Fourth of July and having picnics with friends. The problem is you're either worried you're going to be recognized, or you're thankful you're not. It's always there.

I had great football players. To be quite truthful, my great football players, the ones who wanted the ball at the end of the games, they weren't focused on money. They want to do something great. They want to go to Pro Bowls. They want to win Super Bowls. Those are the people that succeed in sports - or in business.

I still enjoy playing some of those early Straits songs, and I'm proud of what we did, and certainly we had some great times. It's what we all wanted when we were kids. But you've got to have the resilience to ride that thing, to pick up that ball and run with it. Because you will keep picking it up and keep running.

Just because you get to a certain number doesn't mean you have to roll up into a ball and wait for the grim reaper. We were put on this earth to do something! If you stop using your brain, at any age, it is going to stop working. It's like if you stop using your hand, it will atrophy. I think doing nothing is a curse.

For a good workout, I go to At One Fitness in North Hollywood, where my trainer, Jon Allsop, puts me through it all. I like it because it's a small gym and I've known the people for a long time. Jon will have me do cross-training where I'll lift weights, jump rope, throw around a medicine ball and I never get to stop.

Some guys, first pitch of the at-bat gets called a strike - maybe it's a ball off or below their knees, and it gets called a strike - and then the next two pitches, they swing at balls in the dirt, and all of a sudden, they're yelling at the umpire about that first pitch. You just swung at two balls in the dirt, buddy.

Thor is magical, yes, but it is the magic of reality. His hammer was crafted 'in the heart of a dying star,' but so were you! Most of the atoms that make you up are in fact the innards of a ball of gas in space that got so heavy that it exploded. Stars died so that you could live, as physicist Lawrence Krauss would say.

My only focus after I start the putter away from the ball is keeping the back of my left wrist as fat as possible from start to finish. This is critical to keeping the putterhead and ball moving straight down the target line after impact. It's also how Rory Mcllroy squares his putterface, and obviously it works for him.

When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: Their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way.

It just tickles me still when you see Roger Clemens, as great as he is, throw a split-finger and the hitter just swings and misses. They don't see that ball that well. Jack Morris threw an awful good one and Mike Scott. There's a lot of great pitchers over the years that I think that pitch definitely helped their career.

This year I've just been aggressive. I still have that mindset of passing the ball, and being aggressive and attacking to the basket is going to draw more attention, and that way I can find my teammates. Being in attack mode is something I try to bring into every single game, and that's what's making me be so successful.

I have butt muscles, thigh muscles, and then my upper body is super skinny - except for in my shoulders, which you need for a little bit of strength to hold other players off the ball. So I think I've developed muscles 100 per cent from just shooting the ball and running. Every single thing about my body looks like soccer.

As far as sleeping goes, you're up and ready to go at six in the morning. Spring training was always a combination of relaxing and working, and I missed that quite a bit. I missed being around the ball field. A baseball. A bat. The smell of the uniform, you might say. Talking baseball. Seeing opponents as well as the Cubs.

The one thing I know is, if I play good ball, things have tended to come along with it. Everything that I've ever done in my career has come off of playing good football. And so I realize I need to go out there, and I need to take care of my business; then everything else - all these cool, great things - come along with it.

You think aerobics is not a cool sport? I think you are wrong. It requires amazing discipline - flexibility, fitness, knowledge. And you have to do it with a big smile on your face. Also, I once performed in front of 10,000 screaming women. I tell you something, I'd rather do that than kick a ball around in front of a few men.

I can't imagine anybody who showed up at Firestone for the first time who felt like they knew it better than I did. For me to travel to Akron the first time, 'Oh, my gosh, I can't wait, I know every hole on this golf course. I know the big water tower with the Firestone ball on top, I grew up with this. Here it is! It's real!'

What else does a manager do but push buttons? He doesn't hit, he doesn't run, he doesn't throw, and he doesn't catch the ball. A manager has twenty-five players, or twenty-five buttons, and he selects which one he'll use, or push, that day. The manager who presses the right buttons most often is the one who wins the most games.

When I've written episodes of 'Doctor Who', when it comes to the monster chasing somebody, it's the Doctor and the companion, running down the corridor, being chased by a guy with a stick and a tennis ball on the end. Whereas, when I see the rushes of 'Being Human', we're actually looking at the werewolf, and it just looks real.

When you have an injury in your forearm, it affects the command of your pitches. I would yank pitches down away, or they were staying up. I'd go to accelerate, but everything would come forward except the ball. The ball was staying behind. When you have an inconsistent release point like that, it's impossible to throw a changeup.

There is no more reason to think that they expected the world to remain static than there is to think that any of us holds a crystal ball. The only way to create a foundational document that could stand the test of time was to build in enough flexibility that later generations would be able to adapt it to their own needs and uses.

I wanted to get that Division I scholarship and play ball and go to school for free, and I was always about getting to that next step... I was always ahead of myself in some way, shape or form, and trying to envision how to get further along and closer to fulfilling that dream of being free and having creative agency, so to speak.

We never went into a game that we did not feel sure of winning, and when we lost, we blamed it on hard luck or the umpires. We never gave any other team credit for being able to play ball, and the result was that we were hard to beat. If I could get my team to be confident, I think we would work our way to the front pretty quickly.

I just feel like there's a lot of things more important than just basketball, and I love basketball. It's what I want to do for the longest time possible. It's what I eat, it's what I sleep about, it's what I breathe, it's in my lifestyle. I just really feel like there's more important things than just putting the ball in the hoop.

I find the ball, and I think, 'Where's the ball going, and where do I need to go?' It just puts me back in the game, and it's the simplest thing, but it's become sort of like my soccer mantra. I simply use the ball as my focus point and move back into position, and the distracting thoughts disappear, and I'm right back in the game.

I was a 6-foot-tall 13-year-old who couldn't play basketball. I moved around all the time as a kid, and at each new school, the coach would say, 'He's the great white hope' - but I couldn't play ball. So my thing was jokes and characters and making fun of myself and being the 6-foot-9 Jewish guy. That was my way into show business.

The good thing is I don't put the ball in my right hand and I'm predominantly left-handed when I'm running the ball. I just have to take care of the football and even if I have two hands that are 100 percent, I still can't turn the ball over. It's just something I have to mentally prepare for, and I think I'm strong enough to do that.

The only thing I won't watch is darts. And I don't watch cricket. How can you like a game that requires you to take four days off work to follow a Test? And I don't really like golf. I know a lot of English footballers play, but I know that if I go with the club to play, sooner or later I will end up trying to smash the ball with my foot.

I'm trying to get a lower center of gravity. I think, when I play at a lower level, it helps my overall game, just my explosiveness to the rim with the ball in my hands. When I play with a lower center of gravity, my legs are always in my shot instead of playing vertical out there where I don't get the same explosion or legs into my shot.

I have my way of doing things, because I am that way, I try to raise my voice to motivate team-mates and make them aware that if they lose a ball it is not a problem, so I try to motivate my team-mates and to speak to them and, because I see the game from the back I see everything in front of me; communication on the field can help a lot.

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.

I remember as a kid seeing Pong in a pizza place where I grew up in Oxnard, California, and having my mind blown by it. I thought it was a TV. I thought it was just something playing on a television. But then to be able to manipulate the paddle, and the ball with the knob was, in those days, pretty huge to a little kid! It was a simpler time.

I wasn't a jock in school, and by the 10th grade, when I was in boarding school I was carrying water buckets for the girls' hockey team. I was the kid with long hair and glasses and acne trying to learn how to play guitar and piano in the music center. I was not an athlete past the age of 13 or 14 when they start throwing the ball really fast.

Unless someone wants to look funny, I'll not recommend anyone to copy my bowling action. But on a serious note, with the confidence that I have got from the amount of runs I have been scoring, when I'm thrown the ball to bowl, I am pretty sure of what I have to do. I may not be the most attractive to watch while bowling, but I can be effective.

When you're in the backyard as a kid playing and falling in love with the game and you crush the ball? You do a celebration. You stand and watch it like Ken Griffey Jr. You put your hands in the air like Manny Ramirez. You don't hit the ball and put your head down and run as fast you can. That's not fun. It's okay to embrace that part of a game.

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