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Sports Quotes

“I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.”

“The difference between the old ballplayer and the new ballplayer is the jersey. The old ballplayer cared about the name on the front. The new ballplayer cares about the name on the back.”

“I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn't it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball?”

“The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.”

“I truly believe my job starts the minute I leave the baseball field. Going out and catching ground balls and hitting, that's a job, and that's what I've wanted to do ever since I was a kid. But when you think about leaving that field, that's when the job and the demands really start. In New York, Seattle, every city. The community, the media, business stuff. You have to stay on a narrow path.”

“I grew up in Arkansas and that's the law. My dad was a high school basketball coach, so I was raised as a coach's son and I was a baseball player back in Arkansas, and I lived in Texas, too, so I was just surrounded by sports. So that's what I was going to do: Pitch for the St Louis Cardinals. I had no idea I was going to be an actor. So I got my collar bone broken in the Kansas City Royals training camp. And once I got hurt I started doing other things for a while.”

“Coaches and headmasters praise sport as a preparation for the great game of life, but this is absurd. Nothing could be more different from life. For one thing sports, unlike life, are played according to rules. Indeed, the rules are the sport: life may behave bizarrely and still be life, but if the runner circles the bases clockwise it's no longer baseball.”

“In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line. In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! I hope I'll be safe at home!”

“I don't like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game,but it isn't exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”

“In a nation committed to better living through chemistry - where Viagra-enabled men pursue silicone-contoured women - the national pastime has a problem of illicit chemical enhancement. Steroids threaten the health of the 5 percent to 7 percent of players proved, by a mild regime of scheduled tests, to be using them. Steroids also endanger emulative young people. Further, steroids subvert what baseball is selling - fair competition. And they strike at the pleasure of engagement with America's team sport with the longest history.”

“Now tell me this. What would you consider the greatest spectator sport in the country today? Would you say it was baseball, basketball, football?... It's politics. That's right, politics. Millions and millions of people following it every day in the newspapers, over the TV and the radio. Now mind you, they wouldn't get mixed up in this themselves for all the tea in China, but they know the names and numbers of all the players. And what they can't tell the coaches about strategy. Oh, you should see some of the letters I get.”