I have a unique ability to predict the flight of the ball, and my teammates have a unique ability to find me.
Even as a kid, classmates asked pointed personal questions about my family. I have conditioned myself to handle it with maturity.
My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.
I was the guy who didn't get a cool little apartment. I took one for the team. I liked having the place we could make noise in, the place that could be the center of the music. I sat down and calculated it one day, and over the years, I've had something like 38 roommates.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Growing up as a kid my father was British and a soccer player. His idol was a guy that passed the ball a lot, Stanley Matthews. Our family thought if you could be unselfish your teammates would always like you.
After school I went to work at a builders' merchant in Stoke. After we finished on a Friday, it was down to the Duke of York for a drink with my mates and a game of darts. Unfortunately for them I had a natural talent and nobody could beat me.
Despite being quite a shy kid, I was in my element with my mates. I definitely wasn't shy then. We had a lot of fun, running around town getting into mischief.