Transcript
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Hello and welcome to no Wrong Choices, a podcast about the adventures of life that explores the career journeys of interesting and inspiring people.
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I'm Larry Samuel, soon to be joined by the other, fellas Tushar Saxena and Larry Shad.
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For those who might be joining us for the first time and for those who haven't done this yet, please support no Wrong Choices by following us on your podcasting platform of choice and by giving us a five star rating.
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We also encourage you to join the conversation by connecting with us on LinkedIn, facebook, instagram and X, by searching for no Wrong Choices or by visiting our website at NoWrongChoicescom.
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This episode features the retired NFL wide receiver and broadcaster, curtis Conway.
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Curtis was in the league for 12 years, starting with the Bears before pivoting to odd airwork with providers such as the Pac-12 and NFL Networks.
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Larry Shad, I guess we're all football fanatics on this show, but if I had to make a pecking order, I think I might put you first, so with that why don't you leave us into this?
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conversation.
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Yeah, curtis.
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You know this was a conversation that I really looked forward to.
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Curtis helped me win a couple of fantasy football leagues way back when.
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Very nice, so I had to think of directly for all of that, but what a compelling guy, what an interesting guy he's.
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You know, football, I think, is just a part of his life.
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Right, it's a small part of his life and, yes, he was an NFL football player, and a successful one at that.
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But there's so much more to this guy and I think this conversation reveals that.
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So super exciting to talk to him and we can't wait to share it with you all, because there's so many life lessons in everything that he says.
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Yeah, I think that's a great point, Shay.
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I think in many ways, when we just look at athletes, we just think of them as exactly that, what we see on the field, that you know the sensory, that they wake up their football players they have lunches, football players dinner they go to sleep with football players.
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But no, that's not the case.
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They're really human beings and their stories are so compelling.
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So, you know, obviously everybody comes from different backgrounds and his background and his upbringing are going to be so much different than the rest of us.
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I mean, in some senses, like you know, we all kind of grew up very much, you know, kids in America, but our, our upbringings are so much different and his is a story of one of, like you know, in many cases, perseverance and then just simply keeping an eye on the prize and, you know, getting that ultimate prize of making it to the NFL.
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It's just so, so, compelling, absolutely.
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You know he grew up in South Central LA and he's he's very open about that experience and it was for me an unbelievable learning experience and incredibly riveting.
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So with that, here is Curtis Conway to tell his own story.
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Now joining the wrong choices is the retired NFL wide receiver, curtis Conway, who spent 12 years in the league with the Bears, chargers, jets and 49ers before pivoting towards a career in broadcasting and other responsibilities that likely take priority over everything that I'm sure we'll get into.
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Curtis, thank you so much for joining us.
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Thanks for having me, guys.
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You know.
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I think I should also thank you for joining us on a Thursday evening and working us into your football calendar.
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Yeah Well, really baseball, my son, he just had practice a little training, so but it's all part of the deal.
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You know, we, we figure it out, see what works and we go from there.
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Thanks, and you guys also.
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You know you guys made some magic happen in order to make this happen.
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So I think that goes both ways.
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Well, I know this that before this interview started.
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It's lucky that you have your son slash in-house IT guy able to help us out.
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Get this interview off the ground.
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So that's very lucky for us.
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So, once again, hey, and look, once again hey.
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Thanks for taking the time for us.
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So, Curtis, I'm going to ask.
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You know you spent so much time in the league, right?
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You had 3000 yard seasons.
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You were considered one of the one of the toughest guys in the league.
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You were, you know, one of the.
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You were one of the better, one of the better whiteouts.
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Obviously, you know you're, you're, you were such a great player with the Chicago Bears, you know, obviously one of their great receivers of all time.
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What is Curtis Conway doing now?
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Man right now.
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Today are just postseason.
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After every title Well, I mean, we could probably go with today if you'd like, but post career, we'll go with post career.
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If somebody were to meet Curtis Conway for the first time, what would you tell them?
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Or who would you tell them?
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You are.
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I'm a little bit of everything you know, at this age.
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I'm a dad, I'm a coach, I can I mean, you name it business man, so many different hats that I put on is just a matter of what day and time you, you, you know I'm in, but for the most part, I would say I've kind of dedicated myself to just being a husband and a father until until my kids are out of school.
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You know, I was broadcasting and I really enjoyed that.
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But me and my wife, who's really busy, before we had kids, we sat down and talked and we said, you know, we're both going in our second careers Once we have kids.
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We don't want to, you know, do the nanny and babysitting thing all the time.
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So somebody's going to have to, you know, shut it down.
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To be quite frank, I didn't think it was going to be me.
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I'm like, oh, I'm going to be right here in my broadcasting career or coaching or doing something, so the wife is going to be the one staying home.
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But then turned out that way.
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So, but I enjoy it.
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You know, I enjoy being a father and being able to help my wife with, you know, a lot of the things that she's doing.
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I feel, like, god blessed me with what I really wanted to do in life, and that's play football and be able to give back to my community.
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And I was able to do that at such a young age to where I feel like now I can enjoy the fruits of my labor.
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We love that answer and, by the way, his wife is a household name, leila Ali.
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Let's put that right there on the table.
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But we love that answer that you're a family guy and that comes first.
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Let's bring you all the way back to the beginning, though, because we want to start your journey from the beginning beginning and make it linear.
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So we know you were an athlete as a kid, but from just reading your bio, reading about you, learning about who you are, you were more of a track guy.
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Were you not then a football player?
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They get that wrong all the time.
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They think because guys are faster.
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Football track was the thing.
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I didn't start running track until I was in high school, so I'd already had five years of pop wonder football up under my belt before I put on spikes.
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So you started as a football player.
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Like, when did you get into sports as a kid?
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When did it start to have meaning to you?
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Take us through that progression.
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Well, since I was a kid I'm talking like six, seven, eight Sports was always important because that's what we did as kids.
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You know, Saturday morning, elementary school, when recess we played basketball, we played kickball, we played football.
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So sports was always important.
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We always looked forward to doing something sports oriented as kids and, of course, once you start playing organized sports.
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As a kid I played pop wonder football for Inglewood pop wonder, starting at nine years old, and it was so fun.
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My mom didn't want me to play but I bugged her enough to where she couldn't deny me from playing.
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And then, once I got out there and she saw what I was able to do my first year, the rest was history and I don't think the coaches wouldn't, wouldn't allow me to stop playing with my mom, would have tried to.
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They made sure.
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I was what happened in that first year.
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What did you do?
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Well, I was.
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I was really good.
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I will say that my mom, of course, never saw me play football.
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Of course I'm just playing in the street with all the kids and all the older kids.
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But I was always fast, so the older kids will always pick me and we would play in the street and we had this rule called sideline tackle, which meant it was a little strip of grass by the curve and if you're on that sideline you got tackled on to that grass from the street.
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Well, I was probably the smallest kid but I would get picked all the time because I was pretty athletic and I was fast.
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So the bigger boys, you know, they used to punish me pretty good on the sideline, but it made me so, it made me tough, mentally, physically to.
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When I got to play with kids, my age in my mind and this went throughout high school and even throughout college my mindset was always these, these guys that I'm playing with, is my age or either three or four years older than me.
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So my confidence level was so high because of what I experienced playing in the street with the teenagers as a kid.
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So is that, what is that?
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That confidence that you took then when you played more organized sports whether it be or not, I shouldn't say organized, but when you were able to play on the high school level, let's say when you got to, when you got to LA, and you're playing, you're playing more, you're playing more varsity and you're you know, you're obviously excelling on the field.
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You know, I want to talk, to talk to us a little bit like how important it is to have a coach who is influential on you, or or has a good influence, or how influential a coach can be on a young athlete.
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You know, I'm going to be very honest in this, in this interview, or whatever we want to call it.
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A coach that had to influence me.
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It was never a coach, it was no one.
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I naturally was a natural competitor and I really got it from the guys in my neighborhood.
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Like really it was that mentality that I developed was my surroundings growing up I say this all the time and it's funny people think I'm crazy when I say it, but when I was playing literally Pop Warner, my coaches were so tough on us to where, when I got to high school and college, when coaches would try to get tough on me, it was like a joke Like I done already been through the worst that you can be around because we had a certain standard that we had to live by growing up in South Central LA.
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So you know hard work and being tough.
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Once I got to high school and college it was already built in.
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So if anybody that I would give credit to, it would be the teenagers and the guys that I grew up around that were older than me, who and it wasn't verbal, it was by action.
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You know you had to be tough, you had to have a competitive mentality.
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Growing up where I grew up.
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So it was like competing was easy, being tough was easy, Motivation was easy.
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I was always self-motivated, just based on what we went through playing in the street, and so that translated over into organized ball right.
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You get to what the high school level and you start taking it a little more seriously.
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Describe serious, Because I know some people when they say serious, it's like I start training, I start thinking about the NFL.
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I started, you know, working on my body and all that.
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I did none of that Like.
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I love to play sports Like it wasn't about okay, let me get a trainer, like everybody got a trainer.
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Now Everybody wants to lift weights and look a certain way.
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It was really just kids playing sports.
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It wasn't like.
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On the off season of football in high school, for an example, I was a varsity quarterback as a sophomore.
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When football season was over, you couldn't get me to talk about football because it was track season.
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So I wanted to.
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I was running track.
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I wasn't trying to run track to get fast To play football, I was running track because I was fast and I wanted to win races.
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So it was really like I always just lived in the moment, if that makes any sense.
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Like it was never.
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Like okay, I'm taking this serious.
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Like everything that I did competitive, I took serious Like I did.
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I'm a sore loser and what I mean by that is I hate to lose and if I lose I'm gonna figure out a way to come back and win.
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So, to be honest with you, I can't say there was a time where I was like, man, let me get serious about this sports stuff.
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Because I was always in that mindset Once I started playing organized sports, like I played for a really good Pop Warner organization where they won, and so I was a huge part of it when I got there also and losing wasn't an option.
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So we competed, man, and I tell my son this all the time.
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I had friends when I was at SC, when I moved from quarterback to wide receiver.
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I had friends that were playing the position.
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Oh well, you know they got me.
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I'm here now.
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I'm here now.
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So you in my spot.
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So that was always my mentality.
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So I wanna ask then, because you know, actually you brought up a really good point about the idea of you know, season to season, once football ended, then it was track season and then when track season ended it was another sport.
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Now you know full disclosure, you're not the first athlete we've had join us and the one thing that we've kind of noticed when it comes to like great athletes, that great athletes are great athletes and are great at athletics.
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So obviously you had a love for sports and you had a love for competing.
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Was football always your first love or did you have other sports that you really enjoyed?
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Like?
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Randy Moss always said that he actually he thought he'd be a better basketball player, dave Winfield often said that that he wanted to be a football player and was actually drafted by the Minnesota Vikings.
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So was football always the sport that you wanted to play?
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I mean not say you wanna be a professional in it, but was that always your sport?
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No, not at all.
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I was a basketball player man, you know.
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You couldn't have told me back in the day I wasn't a little Magic John, you know.
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Especially in LA yeah especially in LA.
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I grew up right down the street.
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If anybody knew, the park that I played in in Pop Warner is literally probably 200 yards from the Los Angeles farm in Inglewood.
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So you know I was Magic Johnson and so, funny story, I played basketball up until my sophomore year in high school and I stopped because our basketball team wasn't that good and everybody was saying man, you should rock track.
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We travel, we go out of town, we compete on a whole different level to basketball team not that good.
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So my coach, my football coaches and track coaches didn't know.
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But by basketball season and track season being at the same time, I was still young enough as a sophomore to play rec ball.
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So I was running track in the ninth grade and the 10th grade is still playing rec ball when I was in high school.
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So once I got to the 11th grade I was too old to play basketball rec.
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So that's when I ended up stopped playing basketball.
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But then basketball was really my first love.
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I like on Friday nights after a game in high school and I'm talking about all the way up to my last game of the season, you best believe Saturday morning I was in the neighborhood playing basketball, pick up basketball somewhere either at the school or at the gym.
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So it's funny because people will be like man, you was just balling last night on the football field and here you are in the neighborhood playing with a bunch of dudes that can possibly hurt you out here.
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It's great.
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But again, it wasn't like today, where I can't do this cause I might get hurt.
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It was like, okay, we plan against this neighborhood, we plan against these guys.
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I gotta get up to the park.
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It is a different world.
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Yeah, so rec ball was like the why or something like that, or was it organized?
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Yeah, it was organized.
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It was park leagues, it was the park league.
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So I continued to play with the park league.
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Got it Now when you were playing at the playground on a Saturday and you're going down there and it's pick up basketball.
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You know in LA, you know in the area you're describing like what were those games?
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Like how?
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rough were those?
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It was real rough.
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It was like again.
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So just, it's growing up in the hood of South Central LA at a time where gang violence and drugs was at an all time high.
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So this is the type of atmosphere I'm playing in, but I grew up in that, so it was normal for me.
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It wasn't like an outsider looking in.
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This was normal life.
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So again, you don't think twice about oh, I'm a high school football star, I might get hurt.
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It's like, nah, it's game time, I'm at the park, we, I'm a dunk on you.
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If you try to block my shot, I'm a.
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Still, you know it was.
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It was.
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It was that atmosphere.
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So when I think back on it, it's just like we like getting getting hurt and, you know, worrying about the things that could happen never crossed my mind.
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Like I said, I always live in that moment.
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So if I'm playing basketball at the park Friday, not after a game or after school, guess what I'm trying to stay on the court, cause if you lose, well, you might get picked up if you're a good athlete, but if you lose you're not getting on the court.
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So once you get to, five it's like we are here to win.
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We're not.
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I hear worrying about almost staying the corner and shoot jumpers, cause I don't want you to.
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You know, foul me and I hit the pole or I hit the concrete like no we we, we playing ball.
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That's awesome.
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Now, curtis, I have to ask this question cause cause you brought it up and sort of went down this path, growing up in the neighborhood that you were in at that time, you know with, with the gang life that you know we would see on the news and everything else.
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I mean I mean, clearly that was close to you, that was around you.
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How did that that impact you?
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Oh, you know it was a way of life.
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Man, I can go in so many directions with this.
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You know, as crazy as this sound, I survived it.
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So I could take a lot of the positives.
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That most people that didn't survive would say it was a negative for them.
00:18:43.400 --> 00:18:47.125
I would say the best thing for me was I was always a leader.
00:18:47.125 --> 00:19:01.207
So it didn't matter if my friends at eight years old playing football at 13 decide they wanted to tow guns in gang bang, I was still Curtis and I still hung with those guys.
00:19:01.207 --> 00:19:10.942
It's just when they decided to do certain activities I wasn't involved in it and I never had to be involved in it because I guess I mean we were friends.
00:19:11.035 --> 00:19:14.795
A lot of people don't really understand that culture, especially back then.
00:19:14.795 --> 00:19:16.795
We grew up in that situation.
00:19:16.795 --> 00:19:19.450
So these are the same guys.
00:19:19.450 --> 00:19:22.001
That's in and out of jail that I'm talking about.
00:19:22.001 --> 00:19:23.761
We were playing football on the street.
00:19:23.761 --> 00:19:42.644
So I don't look at the drug dealers and the gang bangers the same way outsiders may do, because I really know who they are deep down inside Certain circumstances and situations and decisions that they made based on our environment and choices that they may went that direction.
00:19:42.644 --> 00:19:49.743
So I never I'm not that one who say I'm better than the guys that made it out of my neighborhood.
00:19:49.875 --> 00:19:54.925
I just love football, so there was nothing going deteriorating me away from the game.
00:19:54.925 --> 00:19:56.601
They didn't love football.
00:19:56.601 --> 00:19:59.214
They were talented and they could play football, basketball.
00:19:59.214 --> 00:20:00.760
They were just as athletic as I was.
00:20:00.760 --> 00:20:03.280
They just didn't love it as much as I did.
00:20:03.280 --> 00:20:09.125
To wear gangs and selling drugs and doing all these things would take them away.
00:20:09.125 --> 00:20:14.503
I was okay with not having a lot of money and not having the nice clothes and not doing all those things.
00:20:14.503 --> 00:20:17.364
For some reason I can't take credit for it.
00:20:17.364 --> 00:20:19.261
It was just who I was growing up.
00:20:19.261 --> 00:20:20.660
It's still who I am today.
00:20:20.660 --> 00:20:34.758
So I will say this I'm not Curtis Conway, the man as a father, as an athlete, I'm nothing.
00:20:35.219 --> 00:20:53.480
Without growing up on 56th and Central and South Central LA, I draw everything from those experiences, even today my mentor, who was a real, he was a really good dude but he was a drug dealer and he sold drugs.
00:20:53.480 --> 00:20:58.028
But watching him, he was a family man.
00:20:58.028 --> 00:21:01.740
He's married still married to the girl he was in high school.
00:21:01.740 --> 00:21:04.843
Today he just did what he had to do to make a living.
00:21:04.843 --> 00:21:13.342
But I know the man and so he's the reason I'm the father I am, and the husband I am because I saw how he treated his wife.
00:21:13.342 --> 00:21:17.257
But on the outside, looking in, you would think this criminal, this guy.
00:21:17.257 --> 00:21:23.486
But I knew who he was inside, but I knew what he had to do to provide for his family.
00:21:23.486 --> 00:21:28.260
So again, I mean I can take a lot of the things that people see as negatives.
00:21:28.260 --> 00:21:33.140
I can take them as positive because I experienced them and I can speak on it.