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.
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 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 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.
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.
I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.
The people in your life are important. Meaningful relationships with those people are very important.
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'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.
My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job.
There was no one around me who didn't work hard.
I taught sixth grade for three and a half years.
But you know, I always said that no one else on my block was on the radio, and it was fun.
I knew that God put me on this earth to be on the radio.
I did anything that would get me on the air.
And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events.
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.
Then I learned how to do wraparounds and things like that. I had no experience.
The only thing I'd ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio.
