I want to live and work in Chicago for the rest of my life. You know when you were growing up and you wanted to become president? What I want now is to be mayor of this damned town in ten years.

If I stayed a football player, my career would have been over 20 years ago. As it is, my knees are shot. I found I got the same good feeling in acting that I had in sports, but I found I could have a more profound impact on people.

The show can go on without me, and probably will, but I want to come back to act in Chicago. My wife and I just bought a condo downtown, and I want to do theater.

I didn't want to play a lawyer. I didn't want to play a doctor. I didn't want to play a single dad. I wanted to do something I felt I could learn from, something that would be a challenge and something that would not dry up.

I just think that sports movies have such a built-in visceral, rooting interest, an epic win or lose redemptive quality. When they get it right, it can make for a really rousing movie experience.

The trouble is that right now I want to put as much work into football as I can. It's very important for me to get off to a good start. By the same token, I feel a responsibility to handle the media and those sort of things.

People told me I was more of a soccer player, not a football player.

Television is making sports universal; for the same reason, big-time soccer is growing more popular in the United States.