"A professional football team warms up grimly and disparately, like an army on maneuvers: the ground troops here, the tanks there, the artillery and air force over there."
"Basketball teams, after the perfunctory lay-up drill, fall into the crowded isolation and personal style of ten city kids shooting at the same basket or playing one-on-one."
"Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise."
George Steiner
"Golf is not just exercise; it is an adventure, a romance. . . . a Shakespeare play in which disaster and comedy are intertwined [and] you have to live with the consequences of each action."
"It seems to us an extraordinarily incongruous thing that we have a sport in which two people are literally paid to get into a ring and try to beat one another to death, or at least beat them into a state of senselessness which will then leave them permanently brain-damaged."
Joseph F. Boyle, President, American Medical Association
"Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners."
"Twenty years from now, I can look at this medal and say, 'I was the best quarter-miler in the world on that day.' If you don't think that's important, you don't know what's inside an athlete's soul."
Quotations