Horse racing is animated roulette.

Tennis and golf are best played, not watched.

Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.

Football is violence and cold weather and sex and college rye.

To age with dignity and with courage cuts close to what it is to be a man.

Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.

You may glory in a team triumphant... But you fall in love with a team in defeat.

I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.

Robinson did not merely play at center stage. He was center stage; and wherever he walked, center stage moved with him.

Dempsey himself said you only spend so much time in the spotlight before they change the bulb. He had a very clever way with words.

No other sporting event can compare with a good Series. The Super Bowl is a three-hour interruption in a week of drink and Rotarian parties.

Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker's responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

Carl Furillo was pure ballplayer. In his prime he stood six feet tall and weighed 190 pounds and there was a fluidity to his frame you seldom see, among such sinews. His black hair was thick, and tightly curled. His face was strong and smooth. He had the look of a young indomitable centurion ... I cannot imagine Carl Furillo in his prime as anything other than a ballplayer. Right field in Brooklyn was his destiny.

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