Personality
Hall has long been one of competitive swimming's most colorful personalities. He often shadow-boxes before a race and is known for wearing a boxing robe in lieu of the usual warm-ups. His eccentricity has won him a great deal of fans, but what some perceive to be "showboating" has drawn substantial criticism. He is also an outspoken critic of performance enhancing drug use in swimming, and is one of the few prominent swimmers willing to publicly question the legitimacy of suspected individual accomplishments. In 2008, he compared International Swimming Hall of Fame inductee Amy Van Dyken to disgraced track & field athlete Marion Jones, noting they were both involved with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) steroid scandal. He is type 1 diabetic.
Read more about this topic: Gary Hall, Jr.
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)