A&M basketball's Peter Warden details Europe trip, Hogg wearing #1

Key quotes from Peter Warden interview

"We leave in the morning. At 7:30, we'll pull out of Reed Arena and will drive to Houston to catch our flight. As far as following along, the best way to do that will be through ourTwitter accounts. We're bringing a camera guy with us and they'll be producing game highlights and trip highlights as we go. You'll get a pretty good look at it. We'll probably give the guys a camera for a day or so and let them run around with it."

"We've got the gym information for our games in Italy up on 12thMan.com. We'll land in Rome on Friday morning and will spend the day just trying to stay awake and getting adjusted. Then, Saturday the 15th we'll play our first game against the Nigerian national team. When you do a foreign tour, you usually don't want to play the best team you'll play on the first day because you want to get your legs back under you. This opportunity presented itself late and was too good for us to pass on."

"This trip is important for us. We've gotten 10 practice days, but being able to play against someone else is big. You get tired of seeing the same color and you can't put a rotation together when you're playing against your own team, so playing others on the court is great. But getting to learn about each other off the court, they'll be somewhere where their cell phones don't work, is big as well. They'll have less distractions and more time to spend with each other which is going to help a bunch."

"The chemistry off the court is good already, and it's good on the court. When you have guys that can hang out with each other and then play with each other and challenge each other, it brings great competition. We've seen that in practice and I think it's a direct result of the off-court chemistry."

"How involved was Acie (Law) in the conversation of D.J. Hogg wearing number one? Zero. There was somebody a few years ago who wanted to wear number one, just about every year somebody wants it. That is usually a question I ask the kids, 'What do you want to wear?' because I'm worried about ordering the roster and jerseys and all that stuff. I asked Acie a couple of years ago about this particular player who I thought maybe we could do this with and he was like, 'Eh, I don't think I'm ready for that.' When this came up again, I decided I wasn't going to ask Acie, I already knew the answer.

You can't retire numbers in basketball, it's just the way it is. You only get a certain number of digits you can use, it's not a full set of 100, quite a bit less than that actually. So, I knew we had to do this at some point and I wanted it to be someone that was deserving of it. Someone that fits it and someone that will have the opportunity to understand it.

Knowing that I'm not going to be here all this time to essentially bridge this between Acie and who this is, I wanted that to be my responsibility more so than anyone else. That's a big responsibility for all of us who know what that team did. Nobody else needed to take the criticism or anything like that other than, I think, myself. That's kind of why we chose somebody who we think is deserving, somebody who is a Dallas player who understands and knows the history of it. That's what Acie wanted. When we followed up, that's what he wanted to know, 'Do they know what that team did?'"