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.

Yeah I think it motivates you as people start to count you out. It doesn't make you play any harder because every time you go out on the field you give 110 percent but it does give you more of an edge mentally knowing that you were in the same situation because in sports you always find yourself behind.

When I was in Birmingham I used to go to a place called Redwood Field. I used to get there for a two o'clock game. Where can you make this kind of money playing sports? It was just a pleasure to go out and enjoy myself and get paid for it.

We live in a world where sports have the potential to bridge the gap between racism sexism and discrimination. The 2012 Olympic Games was a great start but hopefully what these games taught us is that if women are given an opportunity on an equal playing field the possibilities for women are endless.

Competing in both track and field and basketball for the Bruins I have a lot of great memories to choose from. But my all-time favorite moment in collegiate sports has to be in 1982 when we won UCLA's first NCAA title in track.

The biggest lesson from Africa was that life's joys come mostly from relationships and friendships not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields they laughed all the time.

My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field the only thing to do was keep swinging.

I never smile when I have a bat in my hands. That's when you've got to be serious. When I get out on the field nothing's a joke to me. I don't feel like I should walk around with a smile on my face.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.