Quotes about sport

For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about the business of beauty. We were mates but there were places our conversation simply couldn't go. There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn't know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck - we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death - but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Sports show you your limits. Sports teach humility. Sooner or later the athlete becomes humble no matter how good he is. But he plays until he has reached as high as he can.

The activity of rooting for baseball and other sports teams is one of the strongest expressions of community remaining in our society.

The individual, by means of the discipline imposed on him by sport, not only plays and finds relaxation from the various compulsions to which he is subjected, but without knowing it trains himself for new compulsions. … Training in sports makes of the individual an efficient piece of apparatus which is henceforth unacquainted with anything but the harsh joys of exploiting his body and winning.

Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives—in short, all the technical laws and customs—which he encounters in office or factory.

Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.

Any guy who’s played team sports has practiced a skill I call “team sport empathy”: he’s practiced focusing on anticipating the other team’s moves. That means figuring out their way of looking at the situation.

The feeling of self-assurance derived from physical achievement always transfers itself to the mental sphere.

Exercise erased cares.

To say that these men paid their shilling to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

Oh! somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has "struck out."