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“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.”

“John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.”

“Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free.”

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

“Roger Federer and my boyfriend, Tiger Woods, inspire me. It's incredible what they've done in their respective sports, especially Roger. He is the nicest and humblest guy. You would never know that he's the best tennis player of all time. And Tiger is so mentally tough. He can block everything completely out and stay in the moment.”

“The whole idea of image is so confused. On the one hand, Madison Avenue is worried about the image of the players in a tennis tour. On the other hand, sports events are often sponsored by the makers of junk food, beer, and cigarettes. What's the message when an athlete who works at keeping her body fit is sponsored by a sugar-filled snack that does more harm than good?”

“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.”

“A good coach will make his players see what they can be rather than what they are.”

“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.”

“We have to move the meter in sports in Africa, especially basketball. With the growth of the NBA globally, we have to figure out more ways to develop facilities, coaching, leagues, and youth development in Africa. The talent is incredible. Especially physically. How do we get the youth to start playing at an early age just like in soccer? The future is bright. We now have an NBA office in Africa, we have legends and Hall of Famers, we have African assistant coaches, front office members, and some prominent African players over the last 10 years. So we must plan well for the next 10.”

“Morale - the will to win, the fighting heart - are the honored hallmarks of the football coach and player. Likewise, they are characteristic of the enterprising executive, the successful troop leader, the established artist and the dedicated teacher and scientist.”

“Things have been invented because of alcohol. Like the taser, okay? Yeah! The morning after pill, okay? The reach-around. Judge Judy. What has pot given the world? Hackey sack? YEAH! Hilarious ring tones? OH GAH! Ultimate Frisbee Championships? It sucks to be a champion at a sport that can't get you laid. It's an unneeded skill like, I dunno, being the best banjo player. Or a squirter.”

“What to do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.”

“And also it's an ever-gathering process. If I pick up the Sporting News or some sports publication and there's an article on somebody and I think I might see that player, I will tear it out and put it in a file, and I have a looseleaf book so when we're going to play that particular team I take out all these clippings and things I pulled out, I go through them, highlight them, put them in the book.”

“When I looked into the story of Soviet hockey and its players, I realized that it has nothing to do with hockey. It was a larger story using hockey as a window into the story of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian people, with friendships and betrayals, paranoia and oppression, and the meaning of sports to people and nations around the world, and how sports was used as a political tool.”