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I know from my Real Madrid team-mates Mesut Ozil and Sami Khedira and my family in Andalucia that people look up to me in Spain.
Oh, you know, driving around, coming to a stop sign and an entire family, from 8 to 80, will be looking at me with that Dr. Evil look - pinkie on the mouth.
My guess is that people look at me and project their own values - importance of family, ego is healthy but not the biggest thing. I don't know. I can't explain my popularity.
I was the runt of the family, the shortest and the smallest, so I think they perceived me as the one who was like, 'Look at me!' - just trying to get their attention and being a goofball.
My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back.
I never understood why anyone cared about the Kardashians until a friend, who's Latina, told me that she liked them because they're a family who look like hers. I was able to appreciate them differently.
I imagine people might look at me and think 'Oh, she has been single-mindedly working on her career all these years and those family issues have fallen by the wayside', but that is absolutely not the case.
I think a lot of people, even if you're not Asian, you go to your place of origin where your family comes from, and you get this sense of, 'Wow - people look like me and talk like me and treat me like their son in the stores and like a cousin in the restaurants.'
As I look back on the day I signed my professional contract in 1973, I've never gone to sleep wondering if I could pay the bills or take care of my family. That's what basketball has done for me. It's given me the greatest of thrills from high school to college to the Olympics to coaching to broadcasting.
As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.