My dad is the person who taught me how important the mental side of the game is. He studied kung fu growing up and he taught me how to meditate when I was a kid.
I remember playing hockey as a kid - I was goalie in gym class and I was pretty good at it. But basketball was my passion. As a kid I went to class, came back from school, did my homework and went straight across the street to practice.
The first martial arts movie I ever watched was this old Chinese film called 'Five Deadly Venoms.' I was seven years old. My dad and I were sitting in front of the TV on the floor in our living room.
I grew up in a kung fu house. It wasn't until I got older that I discovered that most families didn't talk about the Shaolin Temple or Jackie Chan at the dinner table.
The best part of watching kung fu movies with my dad was the conversations they sparked. We never watched them just for fun. 'Do you see how good his balance is?' My dad would always zero in on really specific stuff like that. Everything had a potential lesson.
Learning to meditate is one of my earliest memories. I started when I was maybe three or four. I mean, I didn't know I was meditating. I just thought it was a weird game my dad had invented.
Well, my dad did a lot of Kung Fu when I was growing up, so he taught me a lot about mental toughness. Ways to slow your heart rate down, slow your breathing down to take control of your body so you can push yourself to the next limit.
Well, being at a big school, I had to perform every night. I had to deal with a lot of fans, media stuff, interactions, relationships, you know, just to build myself and show how much I care about Kentucky.
When you go to like the Nike Hoops Summit, or the All-Canadian Game, all those really matter in your development and how people perceive you as far as how good of a player you are.
As a child, I was competitive in whatever it was - first one to eat your wings, first one to run to the door. In everything we were competitive. I always wanted to have the edge.
I can't control what the other team's gonna feel. I'm just gonna go out there and hoop, and whoever takes it to heart and takes their losses salty, I can't do anything about that.
You don't want to be the selfish point guard. You want to be the guy that gets everybody open, that makes plays, and see the ball move before it goes in.
If you actually understand and listen to what he's saying, there's no one that can compete with Eminem. That's why no one goes at Eminem because everybody knows Eminem is just, he's too good in a rap battle.
Life is a weird thing because it puts roadblocks in front of you, sometimes you gotta go through it, sometimes you gotta go around it, sometimes you gotta take a pause and look back at what you're gonna do, have a plan.
The stuff that the cops do and the stuff that happens, what bothers us, the black community, is it's so blatant... It's so out in the open that if you can't see it, then you are part of the problem because it is very obvious.
The calls aren't always going to go your way, and you can't complain about it. I tried to learn that as a young player, and you just got to play through it.