I also developed an interest in sports and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football baseball basketball and occasionally ice hockey.

Baseball was the darling of all sports back then.

I grew up playing sports football basketball baseball everything and acting was such a different environment and different world for me.

In America we have three major sports - baseball football and basketball. They get the most coverage. Then there's things like golf which mop up most of what is left. But track and field? We are way at the bottom of the totem pole.

As a kid I was fascinated with sports and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports like books about Baseball Joe as one baseball hero was called.

I was a ballplayer but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder.

That's what Major League Baseball's steroid scandal was all about the hidden harm in competitive sports that sends the wrong message to the young.

Ethnic prejudice has no place in sports and baseball must recognize that truth if it is to maintain stature as a national game.

Baseball is only a game a game of inches and a lot of luck. During a time of all-out war sports are very insignificant.

Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing baseball fishing - there is no greater example than golf because you're playing against yourself and nature.