Sunday, August 5, 2012 – Mad About Sports
I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures. ~ Earl Warren
Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps. ~ Tiger Woods
Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it’s open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. ~ Dave Barry
I don’t want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it. ~ Rogers Hornsby
Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don’t believe it of any other sport but their own. ~ Alistair Cooke
We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time. ~ Vince Lombardi
The trouble with referees is that they just don’t care which side wins. ~ Tom Canterbury
To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other. ~ Jack Handey
He has turned defensive boxing into a poetic art. Trouble is, nobody ever knocked anybody out with a poem. ~ Eddie Shaw, referring to Herol “Bomber” Graham
It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up. ~ Muhammad Ali
I would have thought that the knowledge that you are going to be leapt upon by half-a-dozen congratulatory but sweaty teammates would be inducement not to score a goal. ~ Arthur Marshall
I don’t think the discus will ever attract any interest until they let us start throwing them at one another. ~ Al Oerter
Cricket – a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity. ~ Lord Mancroft
Oh God, if there be cricket in heaven, let there also be rain. ~ Alec Douglas Home
Cricket is baseball on valium. ~ Robin Williams
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. ~ Dave Barry
It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting… there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators. ~ George Orwell
Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential. ~ George A. Sheehan
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see – not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness. ~ Lewis H. Lapham, Money and Class in America, 1988
If you make every game a life-and-death thing, you’re going to have problems. You’ll be dead a lot. ~ Dean Smith
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. ~ H. L. Mencken
The essence of sports is that while you’re doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it. ~ Roger Bannister
It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans. ~ Robert Lynd
Sports is the toy department of human life. ~ Howard Cosell
People understand contests. You take a bunch of kids throwing rocks at random and people look askance, but if you go and hold a rock-throwing contest – people understand that. ~ Don Murray
When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury. ~ Fran Lebowitz
The ball is man’s most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel. ~ Robert Morley
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him. ~ Blaise Pascal
You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you. ~ Yogi Berra
Just Above Sunset 