Royce: When you signed with the Braves, at that moment, did you like baseball as much as you liked football? George: I was always missing the one sport that I wasn’t playing. When I was playing football, I was missing baseball. And I’ve always loved those sports. Football is what came easy to me and I could go out and be good at football without putting a lot of effort into it. I shouldn’t say that, but it just came easier to me, you know. Royce: Is there a time where you said, "Uh-oh, I made a big mistake here. What have I done? I don’t know if I can play this game." I know you struggled at first. George: Yeah. I took the hard road – I’m still taking the hard road (laughs). There’s been times when you don’t think you can make it. It’s a game of failure, you know. It’s not easy to be successful in baseball. I missed the whole college life. I missed just sitting back and, you know, doing the kind of things that most kids do when they go to school. And then I missed the whole football thing. In minor league baseball, you’re hyped up the moment you’re drafted, you get a little money and, you know, you’re the man for that week or two. And then you're back to playing. In a high school baseball game, I played in front of more fans than I did in my first year with the Gulf Coast League. There it’s family and scouts. And if you go to college at a big football school, you’re playing in front of 80,000 or 90,000 people at a football game. So, you know you have to go through the tough times to get to the good part. Royce: Was there a particular moment, or a crisis, where you really regretted or strongly reconsidered? I mean, you obviously had college eligibility left. George: There was one point – a really big point. There was a guy, our minor league hitting coach, named Leon Roberts, who probably kept me in this game. He’s still the minor league hitting coach for the Braves. There was one point I had to sit down. I was just wasting my time, because every game I’m sitting there thinking about football. I didn’t get a hit and I was like, "What am I doing? I should be out there playing football and in college." And, so finally, I sat down and said I’ve got to make up my mind. So, I gave myself two weeks to make up my mind and during that two weeks, I said there was one coach I think I should talk to because I think I could trust him. He’s been there the whole time. We’re at a restaurant – I think it was Chili’s or something – and he said, "Is this the type of thing I need to sit down and have a beer to?" I said, "You’d better get a couple of pitchers for this one." So, I told him, and he just said, "George, what do you see yourself as three or four or five years from now in the major leagues?" I was like, you know, it was tough for me to picture it, being a successful baseball player. And he goes, "Well, I see you as a guy that can hit .300 and have very good speed, steal a lot of bases, and also hit for power. Speed and power are your rarest combination in baseball. That’s just what I see and it’s too early for you to give up on this game. But, I tell you what, you can’t go out there and keep thinking about football. When you make up your mind, you’ve got to go with it and you can’t look back on it."
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