football

Over the years I've learnt to live with two persons in my heart. One is Edson, who has fun with his friends and family; the other is the football player Pele. I didn't want the name. 'Pele' sounds like baby-talk in Portuguese.

But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens, that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important, but not as important as you once thought it was.

I always thought I wanted to play professionally, and I always knew that to do that I'd have to make a lot of sacrifices. I made sacrifices by leaving Argentina, leaving my family to start a new life. I changed my friends, my people. Everything. But everything I did, I did for football, to achieve my dream.

The heartbeat of a football team is the quarterback position and I think everyone who has any intelligence about the game understands you must have consistency at that position to be a championship team.

What happens is once you start to understand football, you realise that it's not just about the physical side of the game and chasing after a ball. It's a strategic sport which requires a lot of intelligence. It's a very mental game.

Football is a game about feelings and intelligence.

I used to go play football matches in the morning, and I'd go straight from me football game to a dance competition.

It's very exciting... what DeAndre brings to the game is truly special. To have the opportunity to play with a football player like that, that's what gets a quarterback out of bed in the morning.

My parents were great at making sure I got out of bed when I needed to play football on a Sunday morning and that I was ready after school to go to training on a Tuesday and Thursday. But it was never forced upon me or rammed down my throat. If it had been, I could have ended up hating sport.

Football ruled my life for years, morning, noon and night.

In the last year my wife has noticed me struggling to get downstairs on a Sunday morning. I've two young children and football has been so good to me over the years I don't want to spoil it.

I obviously take a lot of pride in what I do on the football field, because that has the ability to influence a lot of people. That puts smiles on people's faces. That gives people a pep in their step on Monday morning when they go back to work.

One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.

Deeper fulfilment is rather different from the happiness of seeing a good film or watching your team win at football, and it doesn't come at the push of a button.

One of the things you learn in football is that you're only as good as your last outing. I don't like to reflect on what we've done in the past. I'm not a very good storyteller, for one thing. I'd disappoint you. When it's time, I'll talk about the good old days. But it's a sign of old age, reveling in the past.

Nixon was a bad loser. He hated losing worse than death, and that is why I enjoyed him. We were both football fans, both addicts; and on some days, nothing else mattered.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

The patience that goes with the game, the little things that go along with the game, you have so much more time to think in golf than you do in football - you have to keep your thoughts positive. I'm not sure I've got that mastered.