Player Quotes - Page 169

I want everybody to feel he has a chance to get into a game when he comes to the ballpark. I play guys when I want to so they'll be ready when I have to. I don't consider myself a motivator of players. I think it's an insult to a ballplayer to have to be motivated.

I got cast playing the best baseball player anybody's ever seen. I don't know how to play any sport, including baseball, but I trained really hard. They had these great coaches, and they started saying, "Wow, you have some like really untapped athletic ability."

One day she told me that they'd decided that my gender was divvied into two neat piles-Men and Guys. Basically, all the saints of the world: Men. The jerks, the players, the wet T-shirt contest aficionados? They were Guys.

I think it's important as a player every now and again to play something that's influenced you as an artist just to expose the people to it.

It is one of my pet hates when I see players who have agents who do everything for them. They don't know how to set up their own bank accounts, they don't know what they are spending their money on and they can't make their own decisions.

In Valdosta, Ga., during a mini-tour event, a player named James Black bet me $20 he could put five golf balls in his mouth and then close his mouth all the way. I tried it but could get only two in there.

The whole kiss-and-tell thing is a negative approach that often happens in a World Cup. We will see negative stories about the players and it can affect their confidence and the overall performance of the national team on the pitch, let alone the bid to actually stage the competition.

...an excellent player, but he [Ian Wright] does have a black side.

It occurred to me, then, how nearly real life resembles the first rehearsal of a play. We are all of us stumbling through it, doing our best to say the proper lines and make the proper moves, but not quite comfortable yet in the parts we've been given. Still, like players who trust that -despite all evidence to the contrary- the whole mess will make sense eventually, we keep on going, hoping that somehow things will work out for the best.

When I started out jumping around with a tennis racket, I never thought I would end up on a list of the best guitar players in the world. It makes me feel proud of the hard work I've put in.

I can't get very excited about a musician who can do Art Tatum because I've got the Art Tatum records. I want to hear him take that and do something that hasn't been done. And there's enough of that going around that keeps the music very exciting. There's so many great young players coming out. I think we're in some kind of renaissance, especially in the rhythm section. I mean the musicians on drums and bass and guitar are really trying to figure out different ways to bring a rhythm section together.

I think there are some good players coming up. I think we are at a point where people can swallow a guitar solo in a pop rock record again.

But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, theres a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression thats possible with the instrument.

I was surprised when I finally moved to Boston and the East Coast, to discover that there weren't that many vibraphone players around. And I was the only one playing with four mallets.

That showed a total lack of disrespect from the player.

I would say that when you go to the very, very top, it's an ability to come up with new ideas, with something new, to make the difference. Every world champion, every player who was traversing this universe, managed to bring something new to the game. This ability to always find some unconventional ways. That makes the final difference.

To my surprise I found that when other top players in the precomputer age (before 1995, roughly) wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns, they often made more mistakes in their annotations than the players had made at the board.

For young players, their minds are not overloaded. I am 54 with four kids and I do many other things. Even if I stopped everything else, spent months working just on chess, for a long match against most of the top players, a classical match, six hours, say, I don't stand a chance. I have a better chance in shorter matches. Rapid is 25 minutes, or blitz events where you have five minutes to make a move, or bullet games, where it is one minute. For blitz, five-minutes chess, I would be top ten, top five. But longer games, no chance.

As an English player you are lifted when the crowd gets behind you. The atmosphere over here can be unsettling for the Australian players and I hope all our fans get behind us.

You can't get a guitar player like Dweezil without his commitment to the work that it takes A) to be the musician that he is and B) to the music itself.

I'm following the players, and it's great. We've never had so many Top 10 big players like now. There's so many out there that are very close.

My parents are from the former Soviet Union, from Ukraine, and I grew up wanting to be a professional hockey player.

What I found interesting about Slava Fetisov was that he went through three different generations of Soviet hockey. In the late 70's, he experienced the Miracle on Ice, and then in the 80's became with his teammates the Russian Five, the most dominant team in the history of hockey, and then helped bring down the hockey system when the Soviet Union collapsed and became one of the first players to play in the NHL, and then ultimately came back to Russia.

If you're a skilled player, you want to use your skill, not just hit the puck.

I have to give Mays one edge, durability. Mickey isn't sound and Willie is. Otherwise, if I had a chance to trade for either player, I'd pick Mantle.