It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.

The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparing for a foul shot, the tennis player at set point over his opponent--all of them savoring a moment before committing themselves to action.

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.

As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.

He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.