The two most important things in my life were academics and sports. I had to do my schoolwork first.

My mother had me when she was 15. My father died before I was born. So my mother was a teenage widow, and she used herself as her greatest example so I wouldn't end up in her position.

We seem, as a culture, to start to adhere to these antiheroes and have grown tired of the traditional, straight-up-and-down good guy.

Football shape is one thing, and then 'futbol' shape is a completely other thing. It's a whole other level of fitness that you have to work to maintain.

That's the thing with me being a former athlete: in the way I attack characters and attack poetry is from the base of being an athlete.

If a child plays sport early in childhood, and doesn't give it up, he will play sport for the rest of his life. And if children have a connection with, and are involved in the preparation of, the food they eat, then it will be normal for them to cook these kind of meals, and they will go on cooking them for the rest of their lives.

Football is my life, but there are more important things in life.

There are things players go through on an everyday basis in the business of football. You don't see it all with the glitz and glamour of game day.