Quotes About Athletes

O.J. Simpson was primarily interested in O.J. His rise to fame in the late '60s coincided with the period where black athletes were more outspoken and political than in any era. You're talking about the generation of black athletes that came about after Jackie Robinson. Athletes after that were just happy to find a place in sports. But when you got to the mid-'60s, you had athletes like Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, who were very outspoken on the issues of race and civil rights.

Basketball is at its best when you have athletes in space making plays. It's the same for soccer, you have great athletes in space making plays and that's when the game becomes beautiful. You have spacing and skill and coaching. It's all synergetic. You don't have to be a basketball fan to appreciate that. You can be a person who appreciates movement. It's almost like a ballet at that point.

The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don't want to go back to the beginning again.

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

My athletes always follow my advice... unless it conflicts with what that they want to do.

Elite athletes learn entitlement. They believe they are entitled to have women serve their needs. It's part of being a man. It's the cultural construction of masculinity.

Climbing is a process - like yoga or running. We want to go to the spots where we're barely able to hold on. Those are the climbs that force us to become better athletes and grow as climbers.

We professional athletes are very lucky. Unlike most mortals, we are given the privilege of dying twice - once when we retire and again when death takes us.

My most frequent admonition to athletes and coaches is: train, do not strain.

I drink during every show. I can't remember the last show I did completely sober. It works for me. I use it as a tool. It's like steroids are for athletes. I'm looser and more self-confident. If I drank less, I wouldn't have been on stage this long.

Out of the tens of thousands of prosthetic legs they've made, there's never been any 400-meter athletes run under 50 seconds. So, if this was such a technologically advanced prosthetic leg, then how come not everyone's qualifying, or coming close to the qualification time, then?

You are worth so much more than points on a scoreboard or wins vs. losses. The best athletes I know are also some of the best people I've ever met.

What drove me to become the world's greatest bodybuilder is no different from what drives other athletes to become great tennis players or boxers or jockeys.

Even though the Olympics take place during Ramadan, some Muslim athletes said they will not fast during games. Then, after sampling the British food, they said, on second thought, fasting sounds good.

Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?

A heroic moral victory for the New York Mets. It may be the only kind of victory we're achieving this season, but he set a good example for professional athletes and the rest of us.

I've dated athletes before but it's too tough because we have the same job, we deal with the same problems and both do a very selfish sport.

Athletes don't have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because, introspection doesn't get you anywhere in a race.

Athletes and musicians make astronomical amounts of money. People get paid $100 million to throw a baseball! Shouldn't we all take less and pass some of that money onto others? Think about firefighters, teachers and policemen. We should celebrate people that are intellectually smart and trying to make this world a better place.

There are all these athletes out there cheating. I am clean and pure.

The Olympics were produced absolutely the same way from 1960 through 1988. It was always the Western World against the Eastern Bloc. You didn't even have to spend one second developing the character of any of the Eastern Bloc athletes. It was just good guys and bad guys.

I never competed against athletes. I competed against perfection.

Looking good is important. We're our own premium brand as professional athletes, so you want to be thoughtful about presentation and represent yourself and your city and sport as best you can.

The press still considers me one of the most laid-back athletes since Babe Ruth. That's supposed to be a criticism, but I consider it a compliment because I think being carefree on the course is one of the secrets to scoring well consistently

....What I learned was that these athletes were not disabled, they were superabled. The Olympics is where heroes are made. The Paralympics is where heroes come.

Marketers know that if people you respect - perhaps laughably including entertainers and athletes - say they like a product, you're more likely to buy.

By continually increasing the difficulty of the sport, we are discouraging younger athletes from starting and continuing in the sport. But most importantly, we are losing the beauty of our sport. We do not want gymnastics to lose what makes it so great - its artistic beauty.

We're professional athletes. People know who we are, and if there's some way we can help with a friend or someone in need, that's a responsibility we have. I really strongly believe that.

When you're young, you develop ways to win, and you think they will always work, but then you get to the top, competing against the other top athletes, and sometimes things don't work.

We can make a huge impact. We can be that difference maker just because of our status and because of what we do. I would advise all professional athletes to get involved and to try to help make a difference. If we don't, who else will?

Female athletes are supposed to be toned down. You're always supposed to talk about the team and never stand out.

To me, doing the Olympics in 1992 in Barcelona for NBC, just seeing the Dream Team take the floor, was a thrill for me. I dont think there was another team in any sport with that high level of athletes playing together.

I can relate to anyone. I can hang out with stoners, skaters, surfers, stockbrokers, lawyers, athletes, rappers. I feel I can hang out with any group of people and find common ground to talk with them.

For most Olympic athletes‚ their training is their hardest challenge and where they push themselves to the limit. For Paralympians‚ training and competition is an escape from the hardships and struggles of their everyday life. That is the difference.

Look at the great athletes, musician, artists, and writers. They all tap into a source. Some call that source God or soul or spirit or consciousness. The Seven Faces of Intention: creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, abundance, and receptivity. And all seven are expressions of what I imagine that source to look like. The very fact that we exist is proof to me that the nature of that source is creative at its core. And there isn't a person reading this who does not have a gnawing sense inside that there's something they're here to do, something creative.

We know that for the last 300 or 400 years, the size of human bodies is growing. Now what happened is that we suddenly, in history, have the backward process. We have these great Greek athletes, we have ultra-powerful Roman soldiers. You look at the size of the Roman soldier who has to carry all this ammunition. You're talking about 300,000 Arnold Schwartzeneggers.

Stop saying athletes do it for the love of the game. They do it for the love of their 32-room mansion with the live shark tank in the living room. If pro sports paid minimum wage, Shaquille O'Neal would be a bouncer at Scores, and Anna Kournikova would be a mail-order bride from Minsk.

I was a runner and a soccer player living in Okinawa, Japan and I didn't have recruiters coming in to recruit me for sports. So how many kids out there and planning to go to college are super stud athletes but don't have a chance because they come from some podunk town and no one comes to watch them?

It's like getting the Williams sisters to play (tennis) against a man, and they're far better athletes than she (Sorenstam) is.

Like many athletes, I played in college for the chance to play in the pros. In the years since I retired, I've come to realize that the education I got in college was for life. I will have it forever and for that I am incredibly grateful.

The beauty of all these years of singing the anthem is that I got a chance to meet athletes that I love, and there was a mutual respect.

The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes. Everyone else is struggling.

I don't believe my athletes care what I know, until they know that I care.

Athletes have a certain stubbornness that carries us through and makes us do things that people say we can't do.

All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.

The top athletes are consummate pros who work obsessively at their craft. Approach yours the same way.

I'm not going to retire because I want the money. We want honest athletes, but at the same time, you're going to have people saying, 'He's so greedy. He's made X amount of money, and he has to take that last little bit.' Yes, I do have to take that last little bit. I'm sorry if that is frustrating to some, but if they were in my shoes, they would do exactly the same thing.

I most certainly believe that when you're an athlete, that really translates to all sports. You just understand it, your body understands it, and your mind understands it. And you just - it just clicks. I've found that happening when I play other sports. I've seen it, like when I've hit the ball with other professional athletes, and you can see they're just learning so quickly. It's just something that's in their blood. So I think it was in my parents' blood and they understood.