Football is the only game you come into with a semblance of intelligence and end up a babbling moron.
It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
The street to obscurity is paved with athletes who perform great feats before friendly crowds. Greatness in major league sports is the ability to win in a stadium filled with people who are pulling for you to lose.
There is a syndrome in sports called "paralysis by analysis."
People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.
Pro Football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.
Sports is the very fiber of all we stand for. It keeps our spirits alive.
Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you still don't know the ending.
If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.
Baseball is the only place in life where a sacrifice is really appreciated.
In the great department store of life, baseball is the toy department.
That's why men need instant replays in sports. They've already forgotten what happened.
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness.
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
The Ten Commandments of Sport 1. Thou shalt not quit. 2. Thou shalt not alibi. 3. Thou shalt not gloat over winning. 4. Thou shalt not be a rotten loser. 5. Thou shalt not take unfair advantage. 6. Thou shalt not ask odds thou art unwilling to give. 7. Thou shalt always be ready to give thine opponent the shade. 8. Thou shalt not under estimate an opponent, nor over estimate thyself. 9. Remember the game is the thing, and he who thinketh otherwise is no true sportsman. 10. Honor the game thou playest, for he who playeth the game straight and hard, wins even when he loses.
