“It does but that’s where I have been quite intentional, you have to make sure that it doesn’t become your identity even though people identify you as that. I was thinking about the day that I would retire a lot and how you want to be remembered, what kind of person you want to be. Something that I also applied in my life was having friends outside of the game which keeps you in touch with normal life.”
You often speak publicly about your faith in Jesus, what was missing in your life, to make you think that you needed to put your faith in something more?
“I was a young man with a very promising future, but I was living a life of my own, going about it how I wanted and not being focussed. After a lot of partying I reached a point where my conscience started eating me up because I knew the way that I was living wasn’t right. A friend invited me to church and it was a moment that changed the rest of my career, I was twenty years old and I became a born-again Christian. I gave my life to God and said that I would live for him and not for myself. My life was never the same again, he completely turned my life around and gave me fulfilment which is something that sport and partying could not give me.”
People may say well the only reason you believe that there’s a God is because you were told to think that growing up, what would you say to that?
“Your parents, whether you believe in something or not, are laying a foundation in your life, so if you are a Christian your parents will lay a Christian foundation, if you are a Muslim or if you believe nothing, you parents are still laying a foundation. But there comes a point in your life where you have to decide for yourself, what you want to believe and what kind of world view you have. For me, that day arrived when I was twenty years old, there had been some foundations laid by my parents but that didn’t make me a Christian. It was the day I decided for myself, not for my friends or my family.”
