I can't believe I survived, not only my life, but I am still playing football 'cause half of those eight or nine years I don't even remember.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I had sacrificed my entire life to play football.
I did enjoy football, but the injury factor for me, you know, I had so many issues. I don't know how long my career would've been.
When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.
Football has been my life for as long as I can remember.
One of the reasons I survived as well as I did was my genetics. My mother and father both had very tough lives, and boy, were they survivors.
Up until the age of 16, I was very focused on sport - I played a lot of football. Then I tore my ACL and had to stop playing.
Football became my life at five or six. The earliest memory I have is of playing in my first boots, a pair of black and white Alan Balls. It was 1970, four years after the World Cup, and I scored three goals at school.
We never had anybody who froze to death playing football. You probably had somebody who died from heat stroke playing football.
It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.
I was a hockey player. I played hockey forever. That was my life and my job until I got injured, so I get sports, and I get the sports atmosphere, the feeling around other athletes, but I never played football.