I learned early in my career that I had to be prepared for life after football because you never knew when it would end.
— Nnamdi Asomugha
I was always the person who would make the mistake. I was the one who would get suspended from school.
I help receivers on my team every now and then, but I'm slow to do even that because they could end up my opponent the following year.
Football came in at an interesting time. My dad passed, and my brother was one year older than me. And so he was basically the man of the house - at like age 12. So I really just started doing whatever he did, and football was his thing, so I got into football.
When football is your job, a lot of what you feel about yourself and about life can become attached to the outcome of those games. That's probably true about a lot of jobs, but we suffer our losses pretty publicly. When you're not getting the results you want, it becomes easy to get depressed.
My favorite piece of clothing as a boy was a purple Magic Johnson jersey from the Los Angeles Lakers.
When you go into free agency and have options, any team is up for you to be on - and the Raiders, obviously with me having been there for so long, have a great shot at it.
Months after I retired, the Kings won the Stanley Cup and I was there for that game... I happened to be there with a buddy of mine and I was like, 'Oh, I miss this.'
In high school, you can just go out there and play. In the NFL it was so much more mental.
I don't think you can ever get bored or lose focus as a competitor.
I think any time you're able to humanize the plight of the wrongfully incarcerated, then you're doing your job.
I think any time you get a boost of confidence, it fuels you to do more, and that kept happening for me.
I didn't have the luxury of going to the four year school for acting.
In film, there's always this looking for the 'If you lay down and burst into tears, you did a good job.'
I talked to a lot of people that switched careers. Not necessarily to acting, but switched jobs. The 'becoming a student again' is the thing that always kept coming up.
I was never a big spender.
Everything in life is about confidence. The more you have, the further you'll go usually.
To look back where I started from, you can't help but be amazed.
It can be a bit sententious in the Nigerian household, to the point where you feel like with any wrong step you've set yourself back so far. It's like everything has to be done right.
You become a family when you're on a football team. It's the ultimate team sport, so you have no choice but to feel like family, and that never leaves you.
I grew up in L.A. in the '80s, and the Lakers were the biggest thing to ever hit the world at that time.
It doesn't matter how well you play individually if the team isn't winning.
It takes time to change a system and to change a mindset.
Luckily enough for me I reached a level in the game where no one questioned my work ethic or my ability and then I was like, I don't care. Every off-season I might do a scene in a TV show or something just to keep that going.
You kind of have to be secretive about what you're doing post-football because if you're really outward and everyone knows about it while you're playing football then the rap on you is, 'Oh, you don't care about the game.'
In high school, my dream was to go to the NBA. But when recruiting came around, the letters for football compared to basketball were like 25 to one, and my one wasn't from Duke.
The beauty of football is you have to perform through ups and downs in a public form with a team and the discipline and the pushing through it and the preparation that it takes to be great - all of those things have served me well.
My position in football was cornerback, and what your job is as a cornerback is to read the person that's in front of you - read their body language and anticipate what's going to happen next.
I was maybe halfway through my career, and I was shooting a Nike commercial, and the director came to the trailer and said, 'Hey man, you're really gifted at this. I get a lot of athletes that come in, but you were prepared, and you made everything seem very natural. I really think you should look into this.'
As far as acting, I just went in and just started training. It was the first thing I did right when I retired. I just went in and found class, and found people, found the right coaches that could sort of just train me along.
I'm always willing to help out when people have stories and they bring them to me. I also like the completely fun films like 'Patti Cake$.' My taste is, if it feels like it's something I'd like to see, then I'll get behind it.
When I hear about a player losing his money, I'll rarely, if ever, point a finger at the player because I know how difficult it is. It's not always, 'Look at this idiot who got paid all these millions of dollars and lost it all.' It may be more like, 'This naive kid with a million things going on in his life put his faith in the wrong people.'
People told me all of the time, 'You could be such a big star if you just talked about yourself more,' but I'm not good at that. It's always been about team.
Anytime you leave something you've done and where you've been for nearly a decade, it's going to be different.
I remember players talking to Willie Brown in my presence. Receivers asking, 'Is this who you drafted? I can't believe this is who you drafted.' I was hearing it from my defensive backs: 'Man, you got a long way to go.'
I hate the term black sheep, but I just felt like I wasn't keeping up. It was a subtle pressure I put on myself.
When I was a kid, I thought good acting was fascinating, and I could tell the difference. I could see that at like 9 years old.
There's a drive, there's a hunger inside of me that says, 'I know what I can do and I'm going to get it done.'
My parents were among the first families from their area to leave Nigeria and come to America, the land of the free.
Seven straight years of losing isn't fun for anyone.
Oh man, you miss it so much when you finish playing, especially when you play for most of your life. You miss just being a part of a team and being a part of the guys. So I definitely think producing brought that back for me. A bunch of people working together for a common goal.
When you're playing to get into the playoffs, your contract is the last thing on your mind.
I'm one of the guys that thinks you have to spend a lot of time at whatever your craft is in order to sustain it, and in order to get better at it.
I always go back to the fact that one man can make a difference. No matter what the issue, we always have the power to change it.
When I was a kid, my aunt snuck us into see 'Boyz n the Hood.'
As far as producing, I was thrown into it on a film called Beasts of No Nation when we were in Ghana three months after I retired.
I don't learn as well, I think, in like a structured way. I kind of have to be thrown into it.
I enjoy stories that can spark a conversation.
For athletes, it's extremely tough to trust people with your finances. It's so easy to be victimized.
I'm really bad at self-promotion.
