Quotes About Adversity

I've been an underdog my whole life. I was the underdog against Adrien Broner and Victor Ortiz, and you saw what happened. I won.

Strikeforce let me take a fight on short notice outside the promotion and I got robbed on a split decision against Kendall Grove. I easily won that fight. So, I went from 9-0 to getting robbed and suffering my first loss.

When you have traveled the world, won Olympic gold, and gone through a very public court battle against your parents all by the age of seventeen, surprises don't come easy.

We lost everything. We even won our own constituency.

Even though the outcome wasn't the way it should have been, publicly I still feel in my heart I won the Sugar Ray Leonard fight.

I'm fortunate now that I coach at Duke University and we've won a lot. I have some kids who haven't failed that much. But when they get to college, they're going to fail some time. That's a thing that I can help them the most with.

I've had 117 fights and that's the first time I've ever won.

When I was 11, I won my first nationals at Savannah, defeating Kelly Henry in the finals.

It took putting one foot in front of the other every single day to get through it to the point where I made it back on the team and won a gold medal in 2008.

It was a tough year for me, '89, losing two Slam finals and losing another five finals. It wasn't until I won the Masters, or what's now called the ATP Finals, that things changed again. Suddenly I won seven tournaments in 1990 and became No. 1.

I was still young when I missed Beijing. I was favourite to win a medal but I knew I had time. My coach advised me to stay at school and finish my exams. Even if I had gone and won the Olympics, I might not have handled the pressure. So I moved on.

I don't remember the first time I won. I remember the first time I lost, and it sucked. It was go-karts; I was, like, 6 years old.

When I was a little boy, Marvin Hagler was my idol. He got no respect for most of his career. His fighting style was straight ahead. He took every shot thrown at him, and he kept punching back 'til he won. I honestly feel that's how I am. I take big shots from people. But I keep going.

I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.

I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, it's a wonder I don't have diabetes.

I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?

The fact that I am blind is not what defines my life. It should be of no more interest than my blood type. People wonder if there is a relationship between my lack of sight and the way I sing. But there's no connection.

I'm a big believer in doing things that make you uncomfortable. So, we live in a world where we want to be as comfortable as we can. And we wonder why we have no growth. We wonder why - when the smallest thing in our life gets difficult - we wonder why we cower and we run away.

The first song that I had that went platinum was 'Keep Your Head Up,' which was a long time ago. Then, you get 'one-hit wonder' with that.

The amount of things I have been through and the remarkable ways in which the body has reacted is just phenomenal. No wonder I became religious, because you don't know why something's happening to you and you don't know how you bounced back.

When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.

As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.

Getting the role in '300' saved me. I'd been out of work for 11 months after 'The Brothers Grimm.' Once the film came out and didn't do so well, the director Terry Gilliam blamed me for absolutely everything. It was pretty appalling, and I had started to wonder if I'd ever get another job again when I was asked to audition for '300.'

Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.