Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Mob rule is dangerous. Well-intentioned, TV-baited mobs are the most dangerous. They do not consider the consequences of their actions, and they're prone to take a simple-minded, instant-gratification approach to justice rather than a strategic one.
Hard as it is to believe, there were three magazines fighting over me. 'Newsweek' wanted to keep me, 'ESPN The Magazine' was coming into existence and wanted me, and 'SI' wanted to bring me back. Isn't that amazing? I had a choice, like a free agent.
In the immediate aftermath of the civil-rights movement, Democrats marketed liberalism to us as fashionable, sophisticated and liberating. Today it needs a surgeon general's warning: hazardous to your family and the values you were taught as a child.
Dan Rather pulling on a sweater and thereby winning a whole new chunk of the populace: That's television. President Reagan's press conferences: That's television. Keith Jackson is television. So are Kermit the Frog, instant replay, and the Fiesta Bowl.
I don't think there are many kids who sit around and want to be actors. I don't think there are many kids who want to sit around and want to be senators. But so many of us want to be athletes, so we're envious of them and we put them up on that pedestal.
What has truly impeded ESPN from overcoming its financial mistakes and inability to adapt to technological advances? The decadelong culture war ESPN lost to Deadspin, a snarky, politically progressive sports blog launched by Gawker's Nick Denton in 2005.
Does each of us need to suffer agony to understand how brutal our gridiron entertainment is? Surely, seeing is believing enough. So, what is football doing to us as a people? How do we explain an America that alone in the world so loves this savage sport?
I don't think there are many kids who sit around and want to be actors. I don't think there are many kids who want to sit around and want to be senators. But so many of us want to be athletes, so we're envious of them, and we put them up on that pedestal.
By coincidence, this particular tiny show on earth that consists entirely of me talking about sports on NPR is also folding its tent flaps this May of 2017. Yes, this is my swansong, my farewell, my last hurrah. Adieu, adios, arrivederci, auf wiedersehen.
When Juan Antonio Samaranch said the Olympics are more important than the Catholic Church, I just couldn't believe it. I said to myself, 'Don't let your expression show that he has just made a total ass of himself. Be cool, and just keep right on talking.'
If all of my instructions to staff during the seven years I hosted a radio show were written down and examined, I'd sound a lot like Bruce Levenson. Hell, I might sound much worse. The path to inclusion and diversity is not paved with precise, pretty words.
I get very envious of my general news colleagues who are always being handed sexy new stuff like global warming, China, and Donald Trump, while my sports colleagues and I must be eternally satisfied with the same old home-court advantage, soccer, and momentum.
Dez Bryant isn't Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees or Russell Wilson. Dez Bryant is a typical, me-first NFL receiver diva, cut from the same cloth as Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson, Randy Moss and Keyshawn Johnson, sprinkled with a heavy dash of Pacman Jones.
Investing in your long-term health means cultivating the skills to prepare your own meals, developing healthy eating habits and a willingness to make time to exercise. The earlier you embrace these habits, the healthier you will be in your 50s, 60s and beyond.
We exalted that Michael Phelps-consecrated water. Rose petals were strewn in Peyton Manning's path when he retired. But hey, that's natural. As we should, we admire those in any craft, no less so in sports, who appear out of nowhere to achieve remarkable feats.
To see the glory in sport, where somebody comes from behind and does something, sinks a shot in the last second or throws a touchdown pass or hits a home run, there is a beauty in that, and at the end of the day, that's why we love sports more than anything else.
As the lone black host at two different all-sports stations, black callers and listeners dominated my show. Black advertisers did not. The show was financially supported primarily by white businesses, and the largest demographic for listener growth was white males.
I criticize the NFL in many ways, but I think it's made great strides. I think college basketball, great strides. College football means so much to alumni, doesn't it? It sort of represents the school. It's when you go back; it's at the beginning of the school year.
This is hardly a South African problem, of course. We are confronting nothing less than a global system of brutal misogyny. Too many men across the world see too many women as repositories of their rage, frustration, narcissism or simply their will to enact violence.
The year after Russell retired, in the famous seventh game of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, Willis Reed, the New York Knicks center, limped onto the court against the Los Angeles Lakers, inspiring his team and freezing Chamberlain into a benign perplexity.
Men do really dumb things. We see weapons of mass destruction where there are none. We over-emphasize sports. We place athletic achievement ahead of academic achievement. We spoil and pamper child athletes and then complain when they act spoiled and pampered as adults.
Football teams represent cities and colleges and schools. The people have built great stadiums, and the game is culturally intertwined with our calendar. We don't go back to college for the college. We go back for a football game, and, yes, we even call that 'homecoming.'
Removing Donald Sterling from the NBA solves nothing. It sets a precedent that will likely boomerang and harm the black players and coaches who are shocked and outraged that an 80-year-old man with a documented history of bigoted actions also has bigoted private thoughts.
Researchers measure that the average major-league pitcher puts 40 pounds of pressure on his shoulder by cocking and releasing the baseball. Curious how much more the body could take, those same researchers tested cadavers. The shoulder broke apart at just beyond 40 pounds.
I don't think you can explain why all these other sports and college basketball have a fair representation of African American coaches, but college football doesn't. You can dig and scramble and scratch, but at the end of the day I think it's just pure, old-fashioned racism.
Quickness and momentum. You take the whole last generation of sports, listening to them, even reading about them, watching the games, analyzing them, arguing about them, instant-replaying them, second-guessing them, and all you'll distill from them is quickness and momentum.
We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.
Every now and then, I get a free ticket from someone, and I look at the price, and it says $800, and I'm thinking, 'A thousand dollars to see,' I said, 'There's no ballgame in the world worth that kind of money,' and yet the attendance for sports is more than it ever has been.
I mean, let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back. I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.
It costs a lot of money to deliver newsprint. It's so much easier to do it through the air, Internet, radio, television. The second easiest thing is to do it through the mail. But when you have to take something heavy and put it on someone's doorstep, that costs a lot of money.
It's interesting too, that the coach of that Georgia Tech team who led his valiant warriors to those 222 points was none other than John Heisman. Yes, he whom the Heisman trophy is named for, an award that honors that college player who best exemplifies excellence and integrity.
I have survived so long because I've been blessed with talented and gracious colleagues and with a top brass who let me choose my topics every week and then allowed me to express opinions that were not always popular. Well, someone had to stand up to the yackety-yak soccer cult.
Remember that the NFL was cultivated into prominence by Pete Rozelle, a pro-war conservative. In the 1960s, Rozelle hired a World War II veteran-turned-filmmaker, Ed Sabol, to produce highlights, commercials and documentaries that marketed the sport as patriotic and militaristic.
So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren't educated so much as they are just kept eligible.
The liberal-run institution of journalism does not allow probing of real problems facing black people. That is prohibited. It might lead to actual solutions. It might provoke black people to wake up every day looking for solutions rather than excuses and meaningless verbal offenses.
I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that's largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory - the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls 'the arc.'
If the players aren't getting paid, there's something terribly, terribly wrong, and that's true only in the United States. Everywhere else, where money is involved with sport, the players get paid. But these poor kids in college, they're doing it for free, and that's just disgraceful.
I've been a solo act, a columnist and worked from home, only relying on myself. Now I'm part of a team, a leader, and I have to fit in at a big corporation and deal with all the moving parts, all the different personalities. That has been a challenge, to be quite honest, that I've embraced.
Unchecked pride evolves into swagger, a hypnotizing mask of insecurity that can and does compromise our ability to make progress and attain power. Pride stands in the way of forgiveness and a strategic approach to navigating a chessboard rigged to prevent pawns from becoming kings and queens.
To compare writing an article for 'Sports Illustrated' to doing a piece for 'Real Sports', the article, it was all me. You know, I'm out there by myself with my pad and pencil. 'Real Sports,' I've got a producer, an assistant producer, and cameramen. It's an individual game versus a team game.
In days of yore, Opening Day of the baseball season was special, signifying that spring had come at last. Today, however, Opening Day sort of dribbles into existence, and the spiritual start of spring now belongs to the Masters golf tournament, where the azaleas and magnolias and dogwood bloom.
As a ballplayer, (Dizzy) Dean was a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef. Nobody ever taught him baseball and he never had to learn. He was just doing what came naturally when a scout named Don Curtis discovered him on a Texas sandlot and gave him his first contract.
As it happens, Cumberland was on the verge of bankruptcy and had to give up football. But the villainous Heisman made it play a game that had been scheduled when Cumberland still had a team, or Heisman threatened to demand a $3,000 forfeiture fee that could well have put the school out of existence.
Why? Why should the bond between a people and their baseball team be so intense? Fenway Park is a part of it, offering a physical continuum to the bond, not only because Papi can stand in the same batter's box as Teddy Ballgame, but also because a son might sit in the same wooden-slat seat as his father.
When I was covering games, and this is back in the '60s, you'd go into the manager's office. I can still visualize Earl Weaver from the Baltimore Orioles. I can just see Earl now in his underwear... with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, holding court. And that was the way it was done then.
I remember one time I wrote something very, very critical about Wilt Chamberlain. The next time I saw him - and Wilt was not a man, as huge as he was - he was not a man of confrontation. And we were in the Lakers locker room. And he sent Jerry West over, and he said, 'Frank, Wilt would like you to leave.'
It is possible to set your standards too high, which can undermine a man's confidence and ability to perform. Instead of reaching for the stars and settling for the moon, there is considerable evidence that man is better served reaching for a blade of grass and settling for an under-the-table handshake deal.
It was not that long ago when the accepted wisdom in football was that the running game had to be established - that was always the obligatory verb: established - before passes could become effective. My, we know how that has changed. Now the pass is established from the get-go, and running is an afterthought.
First and foremost, Howard Cosell is sports. There are all these people, these fans, who claim that when Cosell does a game on television, they turn off the sound on the TV and listen to the radio broadcast. Oh, sure. You probably know critics in your neighborhood who vow the same thing. Well, too bad for them.
I think the four major leagues ought to set up a joint commission - say, of retired judges - to rule on athletes who are accused of doing bad things away from the game. Then each league would retain its independence in determining what penalties their players should get for infractions committed within the sport.