I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn't good enough. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.
I like to see Quentin (Roosevelt) practicing baseball. It gives me hope that one of my boys will not take after his father in this respect, and will prove able to play the national game.
You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
That's why I've gotten so much experience at my age. You have three teachers next to you every game, and if I'm not playing, I'm watching baseball. You pick up little things here and there.
There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
I don't know what drives me to succeed. I know I want to always do the best I can.I guess I was maybe in little league baseball as far as I wanted to be good at that. But school, I certainly wasn't the best at that.