Sports

There are only three sports. Bullfighting, mountain climbing and car racing. All the rest are just games. –Bill France, Jr., allegedly quoting Hemingway

Win if you can, lose if you must, but ALWAYS cheat. –Jesse Ventura, Pro Wrestler

Andrews got the idea for substituting freely while on a recruiting trip for Clemson some 20 years ago. He met Wright Bazemore, who won 14 state championships at Valdosta (Ga.) High. “I asked him, ‘If you could point to one thing, what would be the greatest reason you have been successful?’ He said, ‘Son, I coached next year’s team this year.’”

Defeat is worth than death because you have to live with defeat. –Bill Musselman

There is no 2^nd place. Second place was invented to make losers feel better. –T-shirt

The guy’s amazing. He has the pain threshold of a dead animal. –Steve Staios, said of fellow hockey player Jason Smith

As for the athletes themselves, I was probably more impressed when I started out: After all, they could do what I could not. Then watching players off the court, seeing that their strengths in their sport are rarely matched by strengths in other areas, has given me a sense of their interior emotional limits, and the frailty that on occasions belies the power of their bodies. In addition, my colleague Roger Angell helped at the start: They are, he said in an answer to one of my questions about a particular player years ago, what they do. –David Halberstam

The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare. –Juma Ikanga, marathoner

He was, as near as a batting man may be, the flawless engine. Poetry and murder lived in him together. He would slice the bowler to ribbons, then dance without pity on the corpse. –R. C. Robertson-Glascow, on Australian cricket legend, Sir Donald Bradman

There is a plaque at Rugby school in England commemorating the origin of the rugby game in 1823, when a student named William Webb Ellis, during an informal football (soccer) game, had suddenly picked up the ball and run with it, “with a fine disregard for the rules of football.”

Rugby—a thug’s sport played by gentlemen.

Hard work will only get you so far. If all I wanted was hard work, I’d hire 12 plumbers. You need talent. –Kevin McHale

Among franchises in the four major professional sports, the Clippers are the most inept ever …. There’s got to be meaning to a failure of such immensity. So, consider this: The Clippers must lose so we can be reminded that there isn’t always a light at the end of the tunnel, there isn’t necessarily redemption and there might not be a next year. –Sports Illustrated, April 17, 2000

Doctors bury their mistakes. We still have ours on scholarship. –Abe Lemons

Jordan so badly juked a 24-year old guard named Milan Tomic that the burn victim stood grinning after Jordan scored, which in turn caused a grin to crease Jordan’s face, too. The young man had simply learned a lesson taught sooner or later to all people who encounter Jordan in the flesh. They learn that “it’s not television,” as Jordan puts it. “They can’t change the channel.”

(to a player who scored only one point) You did just great, John. You scored one more point than a dead man. –Abe Lemons

Kid, there are only two plays: South Pacific and put the ball in the basket. –Charley Eckman, basketball referee and coach

(said of Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson) Both of them will carve your heart out and leave it beating on the sidewalk. –Pat Williams

Tom Lehrer gave up writing comic songs when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, on the ground that he could never top that. For much the same reason, I gave up arguing for the abolition of boxing when Mike Tyson became the biggest thing the sport has to offer. –Simon Barnes

Race fans, I had inferred from my one visit to the Indianapolis 500, fell into one of two categories: tattooed, shirtless, sewer-mouthed drunks; and their husbands. –Steve Rushin

Exact figures for the care and feeding of a Formula One race team are impossible to find. This is in part because F/1is the most habitually secretive professional sporting circuit anywhere, so, as a matter of principle, no team is going to open its ledgers. But the simple truth may be that even the teams themselves don’t know. After all, if you’re winning, you don’t care what you spent, and if you’re losing, nobody else cares what you spent, so who bothers to keep track?

I just want to beat one cat in the race. The one that’s second. –Richard Petty

Water polo is basketball played in water according to football rules. –Howard A. White

Show me a baseball fan’s favorite team, and I’ll show you the sixth grade. –Alan Schwarz

There ain’t much to being a ballplayer if you’re a ballplayer. –Honus Wagner

The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You're grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality. –Garrison Keillor

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. –Henry David Thoreau

A man’s fitness for fishing is determined in large part by his ability to stave off boredom. In this regard, Valentin was very fit. “If you get pissed off real quick, fishing’s not your game,” he said. –Nick Paumgarten

He’s really improved his backhand, he’s got that big forehand and he runs like the police are after him. –Nick Bollettieri, said of James Blake

[Roger] Federer is almost too perfect to be dramatic. I compare him to Manolete, the bullfighter who achieved such perfection that the Spanish found him dull. –Christopher Plummer

The whole tournament is about the right to lose to Federer. –Lloyd Carroll

Bass fishing is a little like playing a video game: It’s interesting to do but boring to watch. –Chris Ballard

I have avoided competitive situations because I am not a baboon. –Ivor Cutler

The natural state of the football [soccer] fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. –Nick Hornby