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From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
I've done my coaching badges, I've got my Pro Licence, but I enjoy what I'm doing now. I'm also the elite performance director of the Welsh FA. The main thing for me was always Liverpool Football Club and my country, Wales - and I'm lucky enough to still be involved with both of them.
I'm from Minnesota and have always lived there. And my competitive career actually started in the late '90s racing motocross, which then turned into racing snowmobiles professionally. I turned pro in 2003, racing with the best in the world and living my dream as a professional athlete.
I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. And I'll tell you a real quick thing: we didn't have a pro hockey team when I was growing up, so I adopted the Red Wings as my hockey team just so I could, you know, be amused and enjoy playoff hockey every single year. I really get into it. Detroit is my team.
You have to have a character; you have to build your character. If you understand the pro wrestling scheme of things, then you understand what the promoting is. These guys are friendly backstage, but as soon as the cameras turn on, it's a whole different story: you become that character.
A sportswriter's life means never sitting with your wife or family at the games. Still working after everyone has gone to the party... Digging beneath a coach's lies, not to forget those of athletic directors and general managers and owners of pro teams. Keeping a confidence. Risking it.
No one really sees pro athletes behind the scenes. They don't know how hard they work. They don't see how you work on the basics. They couldn't possibly know. You wouldn't think that someone who hits like Alex Rodriguez needs to use a tee every day. But that's how he stayed on top of it.
I was born in Canada, and then my dad played pro soccer in England and then also on an island off the coast of Portugal. So we lived there for, like, 10 years. And then we moved to Minnesota. So I feel like I've experienced a lot of different cultures, and I'm still figuring out who I am.
I did interviews with tennis greats, like James Blake and John Isner. I also interviewed tennis pros who aren't well - known but who made all the same sacrifices but had just a little spark of a professional career and are now still orbiting the sport, either as a teaching pro or a coach.
I'm the type of person that doesn't like to wait for people to do things for me, and I never want to feel stuck. Why sit around and be like, 'I wish my label would book me some studio time,' if I can just buy my own studio equipment and figure out how to run Pro Tools and record it myself?
Being a club pro and all, a guy trying to keep up with golf's modern technology, I hadn't found much time for Internet dating, but then one day I knew I'd met the girl of my dreams when she replied to a comment I'd made on You-and-Me.com. She said, 'I love it when you talk equipment to me.'
A lot of people say, 'What set the Attitude Era up?' or, 'What started the Attitude Era?' To me - and I was allegedly the leader of it - sports entertainment, pro wrestling, whatever you want to call it has always had an attitude. So, why that particular generation got labeled, I don't know.
I did a business in a box called College Pro Painters. They taught you how to paint houses, how to hire and fire, how to sell, how to deal with customers. You got a one-year franchise. It was the hardest year of my life in terms of hard work. I won manager of the year. It was very successful.
That's why I enjoy Davis Cup, and I really enjoyed college tennis. It's very special. You want to go out there and compete your hardest, because you don't want to let anyone down. You want to absolutely give it your all for your team. And that's sort of the mentality I've taken to pro tennis.
That's your dream, to play professional baseball. When you get the opportunity like that, getting drafted - especially by Oakland, a California team, pretty close to home - it was tempting. At the time, I just didn't think I was ready or mature enough mentally or physically to start pro ball.
Some golf instructors get overly technical and teach the mechanics of the ideal swing. That approach didn't work for me. So, I found a pro that didn't insist that I learn Tiger's swing. He accepted my physical limitations and improved my game by focusing on the minimal golf skills that I have.
Once I turned pro, I was like,' OK, this is not fun and games now. This is me. I'm going to come, and I work on karma. I'm not going to go after somebody if I don't have a reason behind it, so as soon as there is some sort of a reason for me to do something that I need to do, then I'll do it.'
I don't know if anyone's ever done that, where they do a big college game and then do a game in the NFL. It would have to be a Monday game, obviously. If it were a Sunday game I wouldn't be able to do college and pro. Ideally, in a perfect world, I would love the challenge of trying to do both.
Impact Day is just one part of the hundreds of thousands of volunteer, pro bono, and professional training hours Deloitte offers to nonprofit organizations nationwide throughout the year. It's a day to celebrate all we do to make an impact that matters in the communities where we live and work.
I'm sure there were concussions galore back when we played, but the doctors would just say, 'Shake it off,' or something like that... or 'Come on, you got to be tough... get back in there.' I see so many guys who played pro football in their 50s now who are so debilitated from having played it.
Pro wrestling is not fake; it's sports entertainment. We go out there and we perform, and a lot of what we do out there is real, but we're not going to insult anyone's intelligence - there is a predetermined winner. It's just the fans don't know who it is, and that's what makes it so intriguing.
Strong style is a philosophy for Japanese wrestling fans that was created by New Japan Pro Wrestling founder Antonio Inoki. He wanted you to show every motion and show real technique in the ring. It's important to use real techniques from real life and real martial arts. The detail is important.
Once I got a bit older, and we could see there could be a future in football, it was everyone's blessing to chase that dream. And it did me a lot of good: It put me through college, it gave me an education, it got me a little taste of pro ball and a lot of good memories. I don't regret any of it.
The pro athlete is a sad tale. He signs a big contract and thinks he's set for life. I didn't think I was set for life, and I don't now. As athletes, we are important, celebrities, in demand and rich. Then we are out of the game and we are not important, not celebrities, not in demand and not rich.
If you're out there stressing on your pro day, then you're not going to perform well, so I plan on having a little fun. Play a little music while we're out there throwing the football, have everybody tapping their toes and bobbing their head and just go out there and make the most of the experience.
My world, the world that I have grown up in, is very different. I have had intrusions from the outside since the day I was born because of my dad. Always wanting to talk to you. A lot of players only get that when they turn pro so the first 18 years of their life were the same as any other person's.
As Ohio Solicitor General and in pro bono private practice, I defended Ohio's hate crimes law. This included a brief in the Wisconsin v. Mitchell case where the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Wisconsin's hate crime law that included sexual orientation. Ohio's should include it as well, and we support it.
Since 'Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights' came out, I've done a fair amount of public speaking, and the two statistics that always make the audience sit up are that nearly one in three women will have had at least one abortion by menopause and 61 percent of women who have abortions are already mothers.
Drax isn't your average stereotypical soldier/warrior/musclehead. He actually has some depth. It was a character that I wanted to play, not only because I love acting so much, but also, I needed to play to get people to actually take me seriously as an actor and get away from the pro wrestling label.
I was with All Pro Dad, and I was coaching. People recognized me as a coach. They might see my face and say, 'What's going on there, is that something with the Colts or the Buccaneers?' Then they realize, 'This is something with my kids; let me explore.' So I think that helped, that name recognition.
I wanted to be a pro wrestler, but my mom didn't let me. I used to make videos and stuff in the backyard. I had a buddy named Daniel Decker, and we used to have a tag team called the 'Deck Garra Era.' We used to make video after video. We were the tag team champions, but then we turned on each other.
I was that 16-year-old who loved WWE, and I wanted to be a pro wrestler, but I didn't understand why I had to be the bad guy. I wanted to be like Jeff Hardy - I wanted to be like Rey Mysterio - but I was told I had to be the guy who screamed terrible things about America and attack people from behind.
I started doing some demos and got online and bought a refurbished laptop, bought a microphone off of eBay. A lot of folks said you can't really do it that way at a pro level, but I did some vocals that way, turned it into the label and they said, 'Wow, where did you record this? The vocals sound great!'
I do feel in 2018 that pro wrestling has gone in such a different direction. Before, things were so black and white; now, it's shades of grey. It's not so much good guys and bad guys: there are people who are put in situations who do the right or wrong things, but people react to them like they are stars.
I think when I moved to the United States and saw how serious basketball was and how good I was compared to everyone else. You just came from Canada and you're top five in the country; you're young and everyone says you can be a pro. That's when I started thinking: if I work hard, the dream can come true.
A lot of people think that comedy is sort of a cop out to not wrestling seriously, but I actually would argue that comedy is much more difficult than wrestling seriously because you have to be creative in almost everything that you do if you want the comedy to make sense within the realms of pro wrestling.
Putting is so difficult, so universally vexing, that the best the pros can do is tell us how to miss. 'Miss it on the pro side,' they say, meaning miss it above the hole. I can't even do that consistently. I miss it on the pro side. I miss it on the amateur side. I miss it on both sides of the clown's mouth.
We love to be athletic, but at the same time, we love to entertain. So my sister was actually looking to play pro soccer in Italy, and I convinced her. I said, 'Please, there's this thing called WWE Diva Search. I really want to go. I think we can do this.' And sure enough, they gave my sister and me a shot.
My clients were always poor folks, working folks, people who were in trouble and couldn't afford to pay a whole lot. I found it very difficult to say no to somebody who needed help, so most of my work turned out to be pro bono. It didn't start out that way, but it turned out that way because I never got paid.
Pro wrestling was there, and I was good at it, thank God. I started getting a lot of offers, but unfortunately, at WWE I was under a tight leash. I think it had a lot to do with The Rock making the transition, and me possibly being the next guy - you know, the company didn't want to lose another top performer.
I don't have a lot of free time with the amount of traveling that I do, but most of pro wrestling isn't catered to me. I am not a kid. There are a lot of guys that complain to me about the product, but it's like, well, you are not a kid. It is catered to sell t-shirts and merchandise to kids and their parents.
All Pro Dad is an organization that started down in Tampa in 1997. And it was just a group of us who felt like we weren't doing as good a job as our fathers did in connecting with kids and being there and being involved in their lives, working and coaching and spending all the time we had to. We just felt badly.
Sammy Sosa? Everybody knew who Sammy was, paid attention to Sammy. I had already signed in pro ball when he had the great homer year with Mark McGwire in '98. But I followed it, and I was proud of him because he was my countryman. There are a lot of great ballplayers from the Dominican, and he's one of the best.
It took me a few years to explain to my colleagues and my mentors and the people that I looked up to and I wrestled that I'm not in wrestling anymore. I'm in sports entertainment. Pro' wrestling doesn't mean that we're saying we're a step up above amateur wrestling, because there's nothing above Olympic wrestling.
We had a show called NXT, and Daniel Bryan was my rookie, and I was his pro. And the object was for the pros teach the rookies what it's like to be a WWE Superstar. As soon as that hit the Internet, the Internet thought it was absurd: 'How dare WWE put Daniel Bryan as Miz's rookie? Daniel Bryan should be the pro.'
I'm always working on new songs. With the technology these days, any idiot can record on Pro Tools on your laptop. All you have to do is plug a microphone into the input jack and anybody can have their own recording studio. So I'm always down in my basement, singing along to riffs or whoever I'm collaborating with.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a pro wrestler. Other kids wanted to be cops and astronauts, but I wanted to be Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, 'Macho Man' Randy Savage, Brutus 'The Barber' Beefcake, and Jake 'The Snake.' I wanted to be those guys! I used to tape matches on my trampoline and body-slam my brother.
I wound up through a wild set of circumstances getting into coaching. I went in and volunteered with Don Coryell, who was a big part of my past, great coach. A lot of people say he was one of the greatest coaches ever. He was very good in high school, college and pro. Another guy on that staff was named John Madden.
I will tell you what, the Rock was my nemesis. We did enough for each other; we put each other over to be famous. If we didn't have that feud with each other, we wouldn't have had the success we both had in pro wrestling. We really did build each other. I'm very thankful we had those opportunities and those matches.
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.