I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game.

I made the decision to come back to New York, quit my job and move to Paris.

Then I learned how to do wraparounds and things like that. I had no experience.

You know, I think I still have a sense that no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, no matter how much success you have, no matter how much money you have, relationships are important.

I stayed three weeks in Paris, fell in love with the city, and decided that I was born to live in Paris.

And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events.

I'd watch my father get up at 5 o'clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business.

And I always found that the harder I worked, the better my luck was, because I was prepared for that.

Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have.

I taught sixth grade for three and a half years.

There was no one around me who didn't work hard.

My uncle was a hero, Lewis Roundtree. He was not even related to me really, but he was always called my uncle. He was like a father to me. I was closer to him than I was my father.

The only thing I'd ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio.

But you know, I always said that no one else on my block was on the radio, and it was fun.

I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that's something I learned at an early age.

I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.

I would listen to how they told the story, to what elements they used, to how it sounded, and that's who I patterned myself after, the people who were on CBS News.

That's when I hit the ground. So in the instant that that round landed and blew me in the air, I had those separate and distinct thoughts. The guy who was standing right next to where I had been standing had a hole in his back I could put my fist into.

My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job.

I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game.

Probably my mother. She was a very compassionate woman, and always kept me on my feet. And I think part of it is just the way you are, the way you're raised. And she had the responsibility for raising me.

I had a lot of fun in Cambodia, much more so in Cambodia than Vietnam.

So I just got on the phone and the engineer just patched me in and I did reports. I'd get a community leader and bring him to the phone, call up the station and do an interview over the phone with the guy.

Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things.

I had never been out covering a story, but boy, was that fun.

The Paris peace talks kept a roof over my head and food on the table and clothes on my back because if something was said going in or coming out, I had the rent for the month.

I knew that God put me on this earth to be on the radio.

You can work hard to sharpen your talent, to get better at whatever it is that you do, and I think that's what it comes back to.

I did anything that would get me on the air.

The people in your life are important. Meaningful relationships with those people are very important.

Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.

I've done a lot of basketball drills, not a whole lot of competitive stuff. I have basically been in the gym everyday working on my game, working on the time off that I've had from the game, just getting myself prepared mentally and physically for the season.

Basketball is in my blood. It is my obligation to try.

As I've said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators - not recently - fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.

It's very warm there, so we were outdoors all the time. The local people had programs for us year-round, where as kids we had the opportunity to play football, basketball, baseball, track and field - we just went from one sport to the next, year-round.

A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That's how I want you to play.

I've tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we'll win again, but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.

My father was a soccer player. All my friends played basketball though, so I stuck with basketball.

Someday I might have to put down a basketball and have a regular 9-to-5 like everybody else.

I think we have our sports within our own culture that are huge with baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Those are the sports in America that we grow up with and soccer isn't really there yet.

If all I'm remembered for is being a good basketball player, then I've done a bad job with the rest of my life.

Both of us played basketball, and I played tennis and my knees are done. Now if you ask us head-to-head who wins at golf, I'm asking for a couple of strokes.

In the original script, my character was a basketball player rather than a boxer. I didn't think I could pull that off. I'm a little short to be a basketball player!

I like basketball, and I've been to three games, which is so much more fun than seeing it on TV, I think.

As all of us with any involvement in sports knows, no two umpires or no two referees have the same strike zone or call the same kind of a basketball game.

I wanted a NBA basketball gym at my house and that's what I worked hard for and I was able to achieve that.

Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.

I just want to try to ignore the scrutiny and all the distractions and just play hard basketball and let the best come... Improving game by game and trying to improve my game is what I want to do.

A lot of late nights in the gym, a lot of early mornings, especially when your friends are going out, you're going to the gym, those are the sacrifices that you have to make if you want to be an NBA basketball player.