Quotes about Athletics

I hated the sight on TV of big, clumsy, lumbering heavyweights plodding, stalking each other like two Frankenstein monsters, clinging, slugging toe to toe. I knew I could do it better ... circle, dance, shuffle, hit and move ... make an art out of it.

I'm not the greatest; I'm the double greatest. Not only do I knock 'em out, I pick the round.

Sports provide us with dangerous metaphors. A sporting contest is a contest: a game of winners and losers.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way as to take the prize.

Many run primarily for the exercise, but others run to condition themselves for well-publicized races of various distances.

Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world.

I like to enforce myself in the run game. It's something I have control over.

It isn't hard to be good from time to time in sports. What's tough is being good every day.

I think number one is what my mom and dad preached to me when I was a little kid: Just because you may have athletic ability and you may be able to play a sport doesn't make you any more special than anybody else. Doesn't mean God loves you more than anybody else.

I won't have any competitive instincts in any sports, other than golf. I can't see being competitive in sports any more.

I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master.

Most schools don't do this job well at all. Instead, most children feel failure when they go to class. They could also hire athletics to do the job. For a few, sports do the job well. But for the less gifted, athletics makes students feel failure, too. So they hire electronic games to feel successful. And yet for many, even such games yield failure. So they hire friends who have feelings of failure, too—and engage in drugs and other things to feel successful.