We have an obligation to spread amateur baseball both at home and abroad. Building up the game at all levels - Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, the colleges - is in our own self-interest. That's where the pool of talent is - and also of fans.
Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.
I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
It's not that hard to be good, you can be good off raw talent. But I feel like it's that extra step, doing work and putting a body of work in and doing things when nobody else is watching. When nobody else is telling you to do it, you're pushing yourself to do it.
Obviously you've got God-given talent to do things that a lot of people can't do but I actually put the body of work in to get stronger, get faster, trying to work on my technique, trying to do little things that people usually don't do, just trying to improve my game.
My dad's paternal grandparents were musically inclined. And I remember as a little kid going to visit them in their senior building, and they were, like, the stars of the building, especially hosting and performing in their senior talent show.
My brother Art was a doo-wopper. He had a group that sat out on a park bench in New Orleans and sang harmonies at night, and they'd go around and win all the talent shows and get all the girls, you know.
I think some people forget sometimes I do have to go to the grocery store; I do enjoy going out to dinner. I have to get my oil changed from time to time. I do all the normal things. I cut my grass. People kind of forget that normal part, that we do a lot of the stuff that everybody else does, but we all have our talents, and mine is in football.
