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Bill Veeck

Bill Veeck Books

Promoter

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“Show business and politics, being run by practical, cigar-smoking businessmen, manufacture personalities on an assembly line. Baseball, fighting for its life, has been stifling them as fast as they appear. What makes it so sad is that the athlete has a role in our society that reaches even beyond showmanship. The athlete is one of the last symbols of that superfluity of our society, the physical man. The average man finds that although the instincts of his primitive forebears may beat a tomtom in his blood, his own daily conflict has been reduced to the drive downtown, the paper work in the office, the return trip. The conflict is undefined, the enemy is indistinct, the battle remains permanently unsettled. He doesn't really know whether he has won or lost; there is only the vague feeling that he is somehow losing.”

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Book:The Hustler's Handbook
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“Promotions are not without their drawbacks. For one thing, they cost money. That's deplorable. The cost itself, however, can become part of the promotion. There is something about the crisp, crackling sound of money being thrown away that brings the color back into the cheeks and brings back memories of those happy boyhood days down on the farm. Why, people will come from miles away just to see money being thrown away. A hustler should always be scrupulous about having somebody else on hand to pick up the check.”

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Book:The Hustler's Handbook
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“What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!... Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.”

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Author:Bill Veeck
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“To give one can of beer to a thousand people is not nearly as much fun as to give 1,000 cans of beer to one guy. You give a thousand people a can of beer and each of them will drink it, smack his lips and go back to watching the game. You give 1,000 cans to one guy, and there is always the outside possibility that 50,000 people will talk about it.”

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Book:Veeck--As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
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