[when he played football at the University of Maryland]: My football career was not going where I wanted it to go. I wasn't going to be Jim Brown.

[on his firing from Matlock (1986)]: I was still drinking and drugging. There is just so much of that they are going to tolerate on a multimillion-dollar show.

I was a functioning, executive-minded alcoholic. In Hollywood, especially, I drank lots of high-end cognac. Never mind how old I was at the time, I was a black kid with a lot of money.... I never stuck anything in my arm because I'd grown up in New York at a time when I saw guys older than me turning into ghosts because of heroin. But I drank, I smoked.... It became a lifestyle for me through the '70s and '80s, and it caught up with me. I lost a wife during that period and keep myself medicated through drink and drugs. When you take days off from shooting schedules as I did during Matlock (1986), you're going to get fired. Thing is, I had been three months sober when they fired me because I'd been in rehab on an outpatient basis. I've never had a relapse. It made me mad enough to stay sober.

Whatever's happened to me over the years, I know that I've always been a guy who's been able to achieve what I've desired because I was willing to make a sacrifice. Whether it was on the football field and there were 12 more yards I needed to get or whether it was in the studio for this movie when it would get 112 degrees in hotel rooms where we were working ... God blessed me with these gifts. And I'm willing to do the work to make them manifest.