Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don't think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
I didn't corner the market on great stories. I'm not the only one who can do something like work at a grocery store and then win a Super Bowl. Other people can do it. You hope people will see that and say, 'Hey, that will be me.' They're going to chase after it like I did. And they're going to be the next one.
The thing about the Super Bowl is, once you got to the Super Bowl City, it was non-stop football, 24/7. You couldn't get away from it. You couldn't leave your hotel room and not get bombarded by fans. You couldn't go have a nice dinner and relax. Friends and family weren't there, so the normalcy of life changed.
I think, a lot of guys, when they get, you know, those hits or those concussions, they think, 'OK, well, I'm just going to kind of play through it here for the short term, and it's going to get better.' I would venture to say probably 100 percent of the guys that played my sport in the NFL have been there.