In team sports the athletes were bonded by each other, there was an immense peer pressure to keep going. One dared not miss a practice for fear of letting his teammates down. Every time an athlete thought of getting back into bed in the morning he knew he would have to face the anger of his closest friends. But the sculler had to find motivation entirely within himself. No one else cared.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.

Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it

Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions.

Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.