Sports Quotes - Page 99

What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potenial embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn't seem to matter what sport it was-in a straight-ahead, long-distant race, I could beat anybody. If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective.

Surpassing my achievements feels incredible; I want to replicate that again and again.

Running allows me to set my mind free. Nothing seems impossible, nothing unattainable.

To be great we need to win games we aren't supposed to win.

Putting gloves on the fighters was a symbolic change that suggested that we were now making it a civilized sport, and it was no longer this crazy gladiatorial throwback to ancient Rome. It's even in our language: If you want to get serious and violent, what do you do? You "take the gloves off." Bare-fisted is supposedly a much more dangerous way to hit someone. But we've got it completely backward. The glove is a weapon. It massively accentuates the ability of the fist to do harm.

Don't give up on your dreams, or your dreams will give up on you.

Men forget everything; women remember everything.

I'm not looking for starters, I'm looking for finishers.

All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports.

I've always joked about Joe Montana not appreciating his Super Bowls nearly as much as I do because he never lost one. We lost three before we got one

In sports... you play from the time you're eight years old, and then you're done forever.

If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard. The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.

Joe Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black... But neither of us could do national advertising because the South wouldn't buy it. That was the social stigma we lived under.

Because the sport has changed, competition is not only stronger but it's deeper throughout the field than it's ever been. It's harder to win.

The one strongest, most important part of my game is that I want to be the best. I won't accept anything less that that. My ability to concentrate and work toward hat goal has been my greatest asset.

Every team requires unity. A team has to move as one unit, one force, with each person understanding and assisting the roles of his teammates. If the team doesn't do this, whatever the reason, it goes down in defeat. You win or lose as a team, as a family.

I regard sports first and foremost as entertainment, so dry documentary narration is not for me.

Think and then act. Never act and then alibi.

The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them.

You've got to look for tough competition. You've got to want to beat the best.

My favourite sport at school was rugby. All sports are teamwork, but rugby particularly is about teamwork and I think teamwork is the essence of this.

Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

You had to be into sport and, sad to say, I'm a traitor to my country because I don't have a sporting bone in my body.

Man, living, feeling man, is the easy sport of the over-mastering present.