Quotes About Adversity

I grew up in Brownsville; most of the kids I grew up with went to jail, not Yale. If they had heard of Yale, they thought it was a lock to pick.

From the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale, from other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had.

I went from Yale to jail, and got a good education in both places.

Yankee Stadium is a natural venue for another lesson: You won't succeed all the time. Even Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio failed most of time when they stepped to the plate. Finding the right path in life, more often than not, involves some missteps.

Everybody says we hated the Yankees. We didn't hate the Yankees. We just hated the way they beat us.

I wish there was a bar I could send opposing teams to and get them hammered or something - I could tell my buddies in New York to leave their places open or something. Playing for the Yankees, guys come at you extremely hard. I have to be ready or I'll be embarrassed.

You're always in the storm's eye, so to speak, when you're with the Yankees.

There are a lot of 'chicken Christians.' Chickens are generally afraid of life, and they seldom fly or reach their potential in life. And when a storm comes, all they seem to do is flap around the chicken yard, stirring up dirt and running to the chicken house.

I'd get to within a yard of that door you walk through and the thing would go mad. I used to carry an X-ray in my briefcase, to show them. But I had all the metal taken out.

We didn't have much money and my mom scrounged up $15 and bought us a surf board at a yard sale.

The basketball coach cut me within two days, so I was back in the pool. I was the first one in the wall after the first 25 yards, but the last one out because I didn't have a flip turn.

On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.

Everybody goes through situations like this. A tipped ball, a shoe-string tackle on a third-down scramble by the quarterback where he has 40 yards to run.

People said I had no heart, I was lackadaisical, the whole nine yards. But success is the best revenge, and I'm proving all of them wrong, even Evander Holyfield.

I had 1,000 yards when I played on plantar fasciitis before.

You throw sadness, you throw depression, you throw horror at Batman, he's like, 'Yeah, yawn, I've done that.' You throw happiness at him? That's something that riles him; that's something that he's not used to.

All the kids in school taunted me, 'Your dad's going to jail,' and I believed my parents when they said no it wouldn't happen. Then one day I was driving into school with him, which was weird because my mom always took us. And he was like, 'yeah, I'm going to jail.'

Oh yeah, I would have been a coal miner, I would think, if I hadn't had tuberculosis when I was 12.

Those four Super Bowl losses? Yeah, it sucks that we didn't win, but what are you going to do about it? You can feel sorry for yourself, but that's not how I was brought up.

Early on, yeah, my life was a bit of a roller coaster.

People laugh at my analogy in most cases - I go, 'Yeah, everything looks awesome on paper until you stick six guys in a submarine and go, 'Okay, go out and conquer America.''

Yeah definitely, I have to be brave. There are some bad tackles that we don't like. But it's not my job to look at that, it's the referee's job, he has to see what is going on. All I try to do is keep going.

Yeah, the material's been good so far, although I'm sure there's got to be a drought coming someday.

I went through the extremes of amazing notoriety and also the dreaded things that you never thought you'd have to live through. Not everything works the way you want it to, but if I sit back and think, 'Am I happy about this?' Yeah. I wouldn't have done anything any better.