America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

It was the Michael Jordan/Nike phenomenon that really let people see that athletes were OK, and black athletes were OK. Defying a previous wisdom - not only that black athletes wouldn't sell in white America, but that the NBA as a predominantly black sport could not sell in white America.

That's the hard part about sport: as men we haven't started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.

When you invest your time, you make a goal and a decision of something that you want to accomplish. Whether it's make good grades in school, be a good athlete, be a good person, go down and do some community service and help somebody who's in need, whatever it is you choose to do, you're investing your time in that.

Incorporating science, technology, engineering, analytics and medicine to athletes' training and development not just at elite level but basing it right at the grassroots level is important.

I started running because my neighbour, Patrick Sang, was an athlete and I wanted to be just like him. Patrick came from the same village as I do and my mother used to be his teacher. I was so inspired by his success.

I'm probably the least flexible athlete you'll find. When it comes to yoga, I can't get in the positions and I can't hold them. You have to be pretty flexible to do it. Once you get certain positions, you have to have the core strength to hold those positions. It's a pretty good workout.

Over the years, golf has evolved from a leisurely game of stick and ball into a competitive sport for highly skilled athletes. Players not only spend countless hours fine-tuning technique on the course, but also improving strength, stability, and endurance in the gym.

We might not make what athletes in other sports make, but we have greater longevity and we do have certain freedoms to do things they can't do. Like stay home one week and play the next week.

I'm in the perfect position. It's a sports position and a political position where I can help better the lives of athletes around the world.

In the seventies we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it okay for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.

To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It's great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don't believe that.

I had a great interest in sports. I had three older brothers who were great athletes. I was not.

It's long been a problem. But I'm not just talking about the UFC - I mean homophobia in sports in general and athletes sometimes say really stupid things.

I like Barack Obama as a person. He's articulate, he knows sports, his brother-in-law's a coach. He always has the athletes to the White House. But I don't know about some of his policies and some of these people in Congress.

Several professional athletes have wrongly taught many young Americans by example that the only way to succeed in sports is to take steroids.

I long for the days when athletes were revered. I want to see the romance return to sports, to see people enjoy the game purely for the game and the players.

Homophobia in male sports is much stronger than in women's sports; the locker room environment is a lot different. It's going to be much more of a brave step, an earthshaking move, for a gay male athlete to come out.

Here I am just trying to fund myself to play a sport, but the greater picture is that I'm a female athlete really pushing the envelope for women in sports.

When I was a kid, I was always an athlete. I played a lot of sports. I played football, basketball, baseball and soccer.

You've got athletes who are politicians, venture capitalists, musicians, rappers, etcetera. It's becoming more of a popular thing to have other interests outside of basketball, and I think that's normal. Just like when people work day jobs, they have interest in sports, they do investments, they do all these other types of things.

When I first moved out to L.A. to be an actor, this family knew that I was a pretty big athlete back in Texas, and they said, 'You can live in our house for free if you coach our kid in football, basketball, and lacrosse.' So I was coaching all these sports teams, and I got to live at this house in Bel Air - this nine-acre estate - for free.

So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren't educated so much as they are just kept eligible.

At the end of the day, everything is God's plan, and he cares about what we do. He cares about our hearts, how we play the game, and how we treat people. He's definitely involved with how we handle sports and not just the outcome of it. I'm proud when athletes mention God in any way.