Sports Quotes - Page 180

When life is suddenly more serious more of the time, there is also more need for it to be fun at least some of the time. That's why my family will be at a college football game this weekend. We need it. And deserve it, too. Not like a New York fireman deserves it. Or a medic at the Pentagon. But enough.

Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.

In and of itself, sports may be trivial, but as a symbol of the American way of life, it has enormous weight. We are seen, worldwide, as an enormously competitive, enthusiastic people who work as hard as we play and play as hard as we work. When baseball - which has traditionally canceled one day of games for huge national celebrations or disasters - stops play for six days, that has reverberations in the national consciousness.

Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent, Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and why you ask? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.

At the beginning, you are 20 and you can just imagine... don't get me wrong, but having money. Then you realise that it's not only about you and what you are doing but that you have to give back.

When I was 20 or 21, I didn't... I won't say care about anything, but you're like in your own world - you made something that you always wanted to do, and then you kind of think only about your family and yourself.

Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

The earnestness of life is the only passport to satisfaction of life.

I'm no good at cooking or music, but I've always known how to garden. Nobody ever taught me; I just absorbed it. Some families are churchgoers or sports fans. We gardened.

Don't say I don't get along with my teammates. I just don't get along with some of the guys on the team.

To become effortless takes a lot of effort. It's good to compare it to learning an instrument or learning a sport.

People tend to box little girls in. They teach them to sit properly and stand quietly and not attract attention. Sports is one place where girls can be free and enjoy the exhilaration of movement.

Hitting is the most important part of the game. It is where the big money is, where much of the status is, and the fan interest.

Sports is like a war without the killing.

I think everybody has something that takes them away or makes them happier. To some people it's baseball or sports or knitting or the movies.

Winning isn't enough. The acme of all skill is to defeat your enemy before taking the field.

Except for Ali, fighters had never been marketable.

Duran always disturbs me. The guy is just weird. Before our first fight, both Duran and his wife gave my wife the finger.

Holyfield is nothing but class, and I think he's a breath of fresh air for the sport.

I think an athlete should be honest. I know it's difficult, but if a guy knocked me on my can, I couldn't very well say, I slipped.

I'm not religious, but I believe that what I have is a gift, and I respect it and live up to it.

We all say, 'You don't have to run around playing all these tournaments and trying to conquer the world like Dr. Evil.'

I never got to the point of needing drugs or thinking about giving up myself.

I was slightly disappointed, but also encouraged, because I put myself in position to win a major, which is all even Tiger says he tries to do.

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.