We need strong personalities and only one world champion to attract sponsors.
For your friends and family, you are always a champion, but for the media and sponsors, not until you show a spark. Making a champ is more important than celebrating one. I want to be there for youngsters and help them do their best.
I also appreciate the lasting friendships I've made while working with our great sponsors through the years, including Miller Lite, Shell and Dodge.
The corporate media is there to push the agenda of the sponsors, and many of those sponsors are weapons manufacturers. So it stands to reason that you won't get a diversity of opinions on television.
I want to be able to say what's on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I'm sort of done with that.
Let it be known: I am a free agent. I'm operating as an independent label. I do not have corporate sponsors. I don't have no corporate backing. I don't have no major distribution.
A lot of sponsors over the years have left us. They've all come back. But they chose to leave us for a while because of stories we have done about them or their products or their friend's products or whatever.
The founder of the Mona Foundation actually knew my dad for years, and the more I learned about it, the more I realized I really found the perfect charity. It sponsors schools and educational initiatives all over the planet.
Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.
I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding.