A man with new ideas is a madman, until his ideas triumph.

School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards — wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity — come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.

Enduring means accepting. Accepting things as they are and not as you would wish them to be, and then looking ahead, not behind.

If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you’ll see your rivals scrambling for second place.

When life throws you a curve ball just give up, no need messing around with that off speed shit

My limits know me well enough to stay out of my way.

I enjoyed being involved in team sports and making close friendships.

Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are out there performing all the time. As kickers, we’re not out there much. Our teammates build the cake, and sometimes we’re fortunate enough to put the icing on it.

It was very quiet at the hotel, as if there had been a death in the family. When you have quit the Tour, nobody really knows what to say or do. (…) Everything I’d previously...

Who you are as a person far outweighs what you do in an athletic arena.

Be fair. Play hard.

The goal of this book is do for you what Greg did for me: reframe 26.2 miles as accessible and inspire your first marathon journey, one mile at a time.

Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.

No matter the disappointment, you simply cannot divorce your favorite team.

I have failed many times, and that’s why I am a success.

Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this.

Are you okay in there?” China asked.Lucia glanced at me, and we both cracked up.

I have no sense of humor about losing

Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I’d never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I...

Winning isn’t everything–but wanting to win is.

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.

A ball feels different off every player’s racket-there are minute but concrete subtleties of force and spin. Now, hitting with her (Steffi Graf), I feel her subtleties. It’s like touching her, though we’re forty feet...

Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with...

a lot of football success is in the mind. you must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

Every name looks fashionable when it’s etched in silver. (Stanley Cup)

A soft moan escapes me, making him smile even more. He’s too good at this.

Well, isn’t writing a sport? If you’re doing it right, and you have a deadline, you should be sweating.

There are four quarters in a football game. That’s natural, because that’s 100%. I’m a 75% kind of fan, because I’m all about the quarterback.

Baseball, of all sports, and maybe of all human endeavors, has no room for cynicism.

Teams are funny. Sometimes you take two steps forward and take a step back. And you take four steps ahead and two steps back. I am trying to get to the point where we are...

You didn’t play baseball that well with two hands. How do you think you’re going to make it with one? “If you’re just going to tell me what I can’t do, you can leave.

Someone who doesn’t make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn’t act...

He wants to play major college football at a university far away, where nobody will know about his tragic family history. Then he wants to play in the NFL.Every catch brings him closer to that...

nihil novum nihil varium nihil quod non semel spectasse sufficiat

But how a game plan came to be, what a finished plan looked like, I had no idea. I’d heard that all copies were shredded as soon as the game was over.

Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to...

Sports Jerseys: To wear another man’s name on your back is a subconscious slap in the face to who you are. Don’t fantasize about being someone else. Put in the work required to rise to...

You have to give 100 percent in the first half of the game. If that isn’t enough, in the second half, you have to give what’s left.

Pain? Yes, of course. Racing without pain is not racing. But the pleasure of being ahead outweighed the pain a million times over. To hell with the pain. What’s six minutes of pain compared to...

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn’t like losing at all.

Anyone with talent can play in the Major Leagues; for someone like me to stay around as long as I did, I think that’s a much greater achievement.

The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf. It’s almost a law.

…I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as “the sport of the future” since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never...

I love the Olympics, because they enable people from all over the world to come together and–regardless of their political or cultural differences–accuse each other of cheating.

Instead of mascots, there should be mass cots, because these sports fanatics are intellectually asleep.

I think it’s probably the most revered record in sports. I don’t know that there’s any record in sports where people could readily name the first and second guy.

Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?

My mouth only does one thing well, and talking’s not it.

A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.

Forget about showering with my fellow students in Tribeca Alternative’s prison-style showers—one nozzle for four to six girls at a time—in the locker room. It was impossible to work up a sweat during what passed...