SPORTS:
"We changed our rules. If a player does not have some sot of altercation on or off the court once each month, we fine him...The guys that are our top four scorers, each of them will be required once every two months to appear on MTV. The guys who shoot the worst free throws over a one-month period, next time we have a TV game they're required to look into the camera and beat their chests after they make a good play."
Gregg Popovich, San Antonio Spurs coach
"We don't claim to be the best, but we're damn hard to beat."
Adam Barnes
"I've played hockey most my life and I've never been badly injured...Three weeks into curling I've got bone chips in both my elbows. I still can't lean on a table. I've even got curling injuries, believe it or not, just from falling on my arse."
James Allodi, actor in Men with Brooms
"No man is entirely worthless, he can always serve as a bad example."
Brian Oldfield, smoking cigarettes between his shot puts.
"In the field of sports you are more or less accepted for what you do rather than what you are."
Althea Gibson
"I think NASCAR would be much more exciting if, like in a skating rink, every 15 minutes someone announced it was time to reverse direction."
Jeffrey T. Anbinder
"Look around the table. If you don't see a sucker, get up, because you're the sucker."
Amarillo Slim
"Every 20-plus years, I like to show up and kick some butt. I figure I can come back in a couple of decades and do it again."
Al Kenny, who went 24 years between wins. (Mr. Kenny is a super-combo drag racer).
"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward."
Vernon Law, Pitcher for the Pirates
"A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide."
Mickey Mantle
"The greatest country in the history of the world being attacked. So all of this doesn't mean very much today."
Bud Selig, Commissioner of Baseball announcing that all Major League Baseball games were postponed after terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, September 11, 2001.
"Work is something a body is obliged to do. Play is something a body is not obliged to do."
Mark Twain
"And you want to know why track and field is dying in this country? Kids today can watch Kobe Bryant go end-to-end and Randy Moss run a down-and-out and Ichiro Suzuki go from first to third and they will see it start to finish, in real time, the outcome happening before their eyes. But the men's 400 relay finals at the world championships? On your mark, get set . . . we'll show it to you in four hours on another network."
Mike Penner, LA Times Sports Columnist, "Track and Field, TV Has a Problem With You" (The LA Times, 8/13/01)
"You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world."
"Thanks, King."
Dialogue between Gustav V of Sweden and Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Olympics
"It hurts up to a point and then it doesn't get any worse."
Ann Trason, American Ultramarathoner
"The quicker you get there, the shorter the pain."
From James Waddington's Bad to the Bone
"Alan Webb is the best thing to happen in this event, but professionals and collegiates don't want to lose to high school guys. I don't want to lose to no one."
Gabe Jennings, 1500 heat winner on the first day of USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon
"If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard."
Jesse Owens
"We're only a couple of short breaths away from being a carcass. I'm talkin' serious roadkill here..."
A candid assessment on the state of the U.S. Pro Bowlers Tour from a high ranking PBA Official.
"The most-honored ancestors of your matriarch besmirched the season of the orange blossom."
Nick Bakay, describing what baseball trash talk sounds like in Japan.
"When you're having fun, you have a lot of heart and desire. Winning breeds winning. Losing breeds losing, and when you're losing, you don't think of anything else."
Angelina Wolvert, UO Ducks senior forward"For an athlete half a century ago, getting mentioned by the great Grantland Rice was something akin to being an altar boy and getting a letter from the Pope."
Dan Branyon, publisher of The Observer, Ware Shoals, South Carolina
"No, my dad was fun."
Phil Mickelson, when asked if his dad was like Earl Woods.
"I was lucky. My grandmother stepped up for me and said she would take responsibility for me and a compassionate juvenile judge took a chance and gave me one. They were getting ready to send me away to do real time, but they sent me instead to a juvenile alternative day school. And I guess that was the beginning of my turnaround."
Bob Beamon, 1968 Olympic Gold medalist in long jump. World Record holder for 23 years; Olympic Record still stands for phenomenal leap in Mexico City; talking about his early juvenile delinquency and what turned him around.
"The mastery of the true self, and the refusal to permit others to dominate us is the ultimate in living, and self-expression in athletics."
Percy Cerutty
It's like people always say, "Well, does sport teach you anything in life?" It teaches you certain things, but it doesn't teach you other things. It doesn't teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things.
George Plimpton
"I played six to 10 hours a day, every day, 90 days during the summer, and I'd do incredible things. I would dribble blindfolded in the house. I would take my basketball to bed with me, I'd lay there after my mother kissed and tucked me in, and I'd shoot the ball up in the air and say, 'Finger tip control, backspin, follow through.'"
Pete Maravich
"Tennis was given to me not to become a great player and a world champion. Tennis was given to me to keep me off the street corners of east St. Louis."
Jimmy Connors
"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."
David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory, " from Esquire.
"The Rope a Dope would not have existed without the Big Dope."
George Foreman, on his role in the Rumble in the Jungle
"There's nobody you'd rather beat than your good friend."
Charles Barkley, about playing against Michael Jordan, 1993.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."
Winston Churchill
"Everybody kind of perceives me as being angry. It's not anger, it's motivation!"
Roger Clemens
"It was probably the biggest accomplishment of my life."
Jerome Bettis, after bowling a perfect 300.
"About the last thing I ever wanted in life was a knighthood, and even today some forty years after the event, I find it difficult to come to terms with a life where old and valued friends insist on calling me 'Sir' instead of Don, simply because they think it is protocol. But I have consciously shouldered these burdens because I felt that I was the medium through which cricket could achieve a higher status and gain maximum support from the people, not only in Australia but throughout the world."
Sir Don Bradman
"There is no one alive I can't beat.''
Bobby Fischer, 1961, Chess Champion
"When you stand on the victory stand, you must be able to ask yourself: 'Did I win this medal?'"
Kip Keino, Olympic gold medalist in the 1500 and the 3000 meter steeplechase, from a speech urging young athletes not to use performance enhancing drugs.
"In high school, I didn't get the chance to wrestle varsity until my senior year because I had an older brother who was better than me."
Rulon Gardner, 29 year old American from Afton, Wyoming won Olympic Gold for Greco-Roman Wrestling in Sydney by beating the Russian legend, Alexsandr Karelin. Going into the gold medal match, Karelin, with 9 World Championships and three Olympic gold medals, had been unbeaten since 1987.
"He went to Russia and wrestled. He studied all the videotape of Karelin's career. He saw things. Karelin was not quite so strong now. He coud be gassed--if you were in top condition you could run him out of energy. He learned all these things. He was focused on beating the world's best wrestler."
Reynold Gardner talking about his brother, Rulon, Sydney Olympian and Greco Roman gold medalist.
"Yes folks, their gold medal looks the same as everybody elses'."
Bob Costas, NBC Sports Commentator's comment after watching Olympic Rhythmic Gymnastics competition.
"I grew up on a farm and I always learned when you work you go forward, you don't stop and say, well, I'll take a break. You always go forward and get the job done."
Rulon Gardner
"(Basketball) used to be such a lovely finesse sport, now it's a dock fight. It's just football without the helmets and shoulder pads. They score baskets the way the Chicago Bears used to score touchdowns."
Bill Millsaps, Richmond Times-Dispatch
"I never bought an article of clothing because some famous athlete told me to, but, then, I never had a diamond in my ear, either."
Jim Murray, L.A. Times
"I think the World Cup's method of playing off tie games is obscene. I mean, kicking an 18-ounce ball into a net eight yards wide and eight feet high from 12 yards out is like settling a golf tournament with 12-inch putts. Talk about showdown poker. Why don't they just flip a coin?"
Jim Murray, L.A. Times
"Please forgive me...but sometimes I get very emotional...when I talk about my son....My heart...fills with so...much...joy...when I realize...that this young man...is going to be able...to help so many people....He will transcend this game...and bring to the world...a humanitarianism...which has never been known before. The world will be a better place to live in...by virtue of his existence...and his presence....I acknowledge only a small part in that...in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself...to nurture this young man...and bring him to the point where he can make his contribution to humanity....This is my treasure....Please accept it...and use it wisely...Thank you."
Earl Woods, father of Tiger Woods speaking at the Fred Haskins Award dinner in 1996.
"You weren't s--- then, Tiger. You ain't s--- now. You ain't never gonna be s---."
Earl Woods speaking to his son Tiger Woods.
"Mental toughness can take you to the top, and mental weakness straight to the bottom."
John Schiefer
"Mental will is a muscle that needs exercise, just like muscles of the body."
Lynn Jennings
"When I did this three years ago, it was like death. When I did it last year, it was like near death. This year, it was just really hard."
John Howie, wheelchair athlete, describing his Charlotte Observer 10k races from 1990 - 1993.
"I still bother with runners I call hamburgers. They're never going to run any record times. But they can fulfill their own potential."
Bill Bowerman
"If you make one mistake, it can result in vasectomy."
John Rowland, Olympian, speaking about the steeplechase
"I don't like my hockey sticks touching other sticks, and I don't like them crossing one another, and I kind of have them hidden in the corner. I put baby powder on the ends. I think it's essentially a matter of taking care of what takes care of you."
Wayne Gretzky
"I had all my own teeth and I wanted to keep it that way."
Tom Glavine on why he played baseball rather than hockey.
"I just made up my mind that I was going to lose my teeth and have my face cut to pieces."
Johnny Bower, National Hockey League player, when asked how he decided to become a goalie
"I'm not dumb enough to be a goalie."
Brett Hull
"No bastard ever won a war dying for his country. You win a war by making the
other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
General George Patton
"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."
General George Patton
"If a man does his best, what else is there?"
General George S. Patton
"In case you haven't been keeping track of current events, we just got our
asses kicked."
Soldier, from the movie Aliens
"I ain't got time to bleed."
Jesse Ventura from Arnold Schwartzenager's Predator
"Charlie don't surf."
Robert Duval in Apocalypse Now
"...my papa said son don't let the man getcha and do what he done to me..."
John Fogerty
"Charlie don't take no R & R."
-Robert Duval in Apocalypse Now
"Real fish don't have to have their sorry asses barged around some dam."
A quote from Logan's famous "Wimpy Trout" email.
"It only hurt once, from beginning to end."
James Counsilman, College Swimming Coach (after swimming the English Channel at the age of 58). Counsilman got his start as a swimmer at the East St. Louis YMCA. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an Honor Coach in 1976
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