Quotations About Sports I

Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential. ~George A. Sheehan

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls. ~George Bernard Shaw



Baseball and football are very different games. In a way, both of them are easy. Football is easy if you're crazy as hell. Baseball is easy if you've got patience. They'd both be easier for me if I were a little more crazy - and a little more patient. ~Bo Jackson


There isn't a single professional sports season now that doesn't go on at least a month too long. Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both. ~James Reston



Sports is human life in microcosm. ~Howard Cosell



Losing is the great American sin. ~Jerome Holtzman


The essence of sports is that while you're doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it. ~Roger Bannister


If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score? ~Vince Lombardi

An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head. ~Emil Zatopek


It's like going into a nuclear war with bows and arrows. ~Joe Kinnear


I thought lacrosse was what you find in la church. ~Robin Williams


Officials are the only guys who can rob you and then get a police escort out of the stadium. ~Ron Bolton


To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark. ~Roland Barthes

Losing streaks are funny. If you lose at the beginning, you get off to a bad start. If you lose in the middle of the season, you're in a slump. If you lose at the end, you're choking. ~Gene Mauch


He has turned defensive boxing into a poetic art. Trouble is, nobody ever knocked anybody out with a poem. ~Eddie Shaw


It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans. ~Robert Lynd


People understand contests. You take a bunch of kids throwing rocks at random and people look askance, but if you go and hold a rock-throwing contest - people understand that. ~Don Murray


All sports are games of inches. ~Dick Ritger


Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. ~Rita Mae Brown


When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury. ~Fran Lebowitz