Sportspeople From Houston

"You mean how can I turn into the greatest basketball player in the world all of a sudden? I don't know, man. I'm just different. I think this is when you're supposed to be playing your best basketball and you have to find a way to get your team to win these games when you're talking about the playoffs coming around. [...] You just keep a couple things in your pocket all year long, and whenever you do it at a certain point of the year, they deem it something else like 'Playoff Jimmy'. But it's just me playing the long game throughout the season. I know that I'm really good at this game, and I know I could do a lot of things well on the basketball court. There are just times when you have to step it up a notch. You can't show the opponent everything now. You have to always keep people guessing. Whatever y'all want to call it, 'Playoff Jimmy,' or 'that crazy motherfucker Emo Jimmy,' I don't care."

"I'm just messing with stuff to make the internet mad."

"I want other teams to hate us, you don't want to play Miami. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be a dogfight."

"You fucking need me."

"I think I hate losing more than I love to win."

"I didn't walk through all that fire just to smell the smoke."

"Everything I want to do is just quantify my work, just quantify the work that I put in. I don't really like to look at the results. Never like to look at the results, just the process of getting better. You can look back and say that there's so many things that motivate me and drive me to want more, to be the best. And why do I just keep getting up and going and going and going? But I had a purpose before everybody had an opinion. It's not about anybody else."

"You either win or you learn. That's how I feel. You either win or you learn. Win, lose, I always reflect on the things I could have done better, anything you could have done better to try and take that next step. That'll be the same process I always have going on."

"Defense played their ass off. They played how they played all year. I truly believe offense wins games but . How our defense has been able to play is a great testament to them."

"It's hard to just sit here and reflect on four years, a whole year with my brothers this year, all of that right now. It hurts me. You talk about how much it means to you and the team. It's supposed to hurt. This is not a good feeling. This is a feeling I've never felt before. It hurts me in my heart, you know. When I decided to come to this school, I told Coach Riley, I'm going to go win you a National Championship, and I failed to do that. Moving forward, I definitely hope -- I've already told them, I hope that you guys learn from this. I hope everybody learns from this. It hurts me the most because usually, when you come up short in something, you can come back and you can fix it. I can't come back and fix it. I'll never play college football again."

"Simone is so good that the rest of us can only hope to finish second to her in the all-around. What else can you do? She does all sorts of crazy things no one else can do."

"She’s the saving grace for U.S.A. Gymnastics, whether they have admitted it or not. Boy, they are a mess. If it wasn’t for her, I really don’t know how they would still be around."

"Life just happens so quickly and now I have a greater appreciation for life after everything that's happened in the last five years."

"I’m going to go out there and represent the U.S.A., represent World Champions Centre, and represent Black and brown girls over the world. At the end of the day, I’m not representing U.S.A. Gymnastics."

"I feel like I realized that power after I came out, after the #MeToo movement, and that was kind of scary. But it’s like, wow, my presence is very big in gymnastics but also online, just in the world in general. So I have to be a bit careful about what I say."

"Over the years, obviously since I’ve been so dominant, everybody supported the gymnastics and praised me for what I’ve done in the gym — and not really outside (of the gym)."

"I definitely had the team in my best interest, and that’s why I decided to pull out. I didn’t want to potentially lose a medal spot for them, because the girls were more than prepared to go in and to do their job, which they did. My body and my mind just said no. Even I didn’t know what I was going through it, until it just happened.... Train five years and it doesn’t go the way you wanted. But I know that I helped a lot of people and athletes speak out about mental health and saying no."

"I am going back home in one piece, which I was a little bit nervous about. It's not how I wanted it to go, but I think we've opened bigger doors and bigger conversations."

"It's so crazy. I'm happy I was able to get back out there and do one more routine, especially since I had the girls there rooting me on as well as the guys. It just felt really amazing. I'm proud of myself for the way I pushed through and even learned that dismount that I haven't done in years. And just put up a good set, that's all I really wanted. I wasn't expecting to walk away with a medal or anything, I just wanted to go out there and do it for myself. And I did."

"I decided to pull myself out so if anything, I think by having me not in competition they won the medal because if I would have been in, I would have gotten more lost in the air and had a fall and potentially injured myself and you can't replace an athlete. It could have gone a lot of different ways, but people don't know the rules. They think 'Well, she just quit,' and I'm like, 'No, I don't think so.'"

"We're not just athletes or entertainment -- we're human, too, and we have real emotions. Sometimes they don't realize that we have things going on behind the scenes that affects us whenever we go out and compete."

"But at the end of the day it’s like, we want to walk out of here, not be dragged out here on a stretcher. I just don’t trust myself as much as I used to. And I don’t know if it’s age—I’m a little bit more nervous when I do gymnastics. I feel like I’m also not having as much fun, and I know that."

"I love animals, always had. It's totally unfair what we do to animals who have no voice, who can't say anything, who can't do anything about it. And since they can't help themselves, someone needs to … I think people definitely need to pay more attention because it's so unfair. … [If you see an animal in need or mistreated] just make sure that you don't forget about the animal, because you wouldn't want anybody to forget about you if you couldn't talk."

"People need to treat animals like they would treat a kid. You have to take care of it, make sure they are happy and they have anything they need. If you don’t have the time, then you don’t need an animal. … I want people to be aware of what is around them. Just because they don’t want to deal with it, doesn’t mean they can shut it out."

"My guys, my colleagues didn't stand up with me. And I can't make any excuse for them. Had we shown any amount of solidarity, if the superstars had stood up and said 'We're with Curt Flood,' if the superstars had walked into the courtroom in New York and made their presence known, I think that the owners would have gotten the message very clearly and given me a chance to win that case."

"After twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several States."

"I often wondered what I would do if I were ever traded because it happened many, many times, and it was "part of the game." And then suddenly it happened to me. I was leaving probably one of the greatest organizations in the world to at that time what was probably the least liked, and by God, this is America, and I'm a human being. I'm not a piece of property. I'm not a consignment of goods."

"I guess you really have to understand who that person, who that Curt Flood was. I'm a child of the 60s. I'm a man of the 60s. During that period of time, this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia...Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution. In the Southern part of the United States we were marching for civil rights and Dr. King had been assasinated, and we lost the Kennedys. And to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player, I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium [was] truly hypocrisy, and now I found that all of those rights that these great Americans were dying for, I didn't have in my own profession."

"My mom said 'you are either going to be in jail, or be killed'. So I decided to do something different because I didn't want to be in one of those positions, so I kind of focused on football and took off from there."