Quotes About Athletes

Everybody used to say that baseball players can't dress and athletes can't dress. You know, a lot of athletes now are trying to prove everybody wrong, though there are some athletes that try too hard and try to do over-the-top things. But me, I try to be simple and just make whatever I'm wearing look good.

I think pro-athletes should be forced to use steroids. I think we as fans deserve the greatest athletes science can create! Lets go! Anything that will make you run faster, jump higher! I have High-Definition TV! I want my athletes like my video games! Lets go! I could care less if you die at 40. You hate life after sports anyways. I'm doing you a favor.

I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.

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 team with the best athletes doesn't usually win. It's the team with the athletes who play best together.

Olympics are probably the most important thing for Russians than any other athletes in the whole world. Since I was a little kid and since everybody was a little kid, their dream was playing in Olympic Games, especially if we have a chance to represent our country in Sochi, it's unbelievable and it's going to be a great thing.

I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of 'student-athletes.' I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don't believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that's another story.

Little did I know that there's nothing more competitive in the world than a professional ballroom dancer. They are as competitive as Olympic athletes.

At 13, I was a big, totally uncoordinated, hopeless football player. I responded to somebody elses rules, and I stayed just good enough to get a scholarship to Columbia, which was looking for scholar-athletes.

It takes patience to become the best runner you can be. Top athletes realize that running is a long-term sport. It is set up for people who value delayed gratification and who like hard-earned success.

I think there's going to be pressure on all the British athletes. It's a home Olympics at the end of the day. I like adrenaline, that's something I feed off. I'm just going to go out there and do my best.

The coverage [of crimes] is different. It's less angry when white [athletes] are involved, less accusatory, less judgemental. I see that in the pieces that are written and reported. At times it bothers me to the point that I just stop reading...just stop.

A lot of athletes have this sort of invincibility: [The jellyfish] should worry about me. I don't worry about them. I'll just swim right through them.

I think we have to keep putting women's sports in the limelight. I thought the Women's World Cup did a wonderful job of showing the quality of women's soccer. But we also need coverage and marketing and press and getting these female athletes to become household names.

I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.

The ancient Greeks kept women athletes out of their games. They wouldn't even let them on the sidelines. I'm not sure but that they were right.

Gay people are born into, and belong to, every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths. They are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes. And whether we know it or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors. Being gay is not a Western invention. It is a human reality.

The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.

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

We feel very honored to have been offered the responsibility to host this great event, Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate, and this decision means that we can now prepare to welcome the world's best athletes to a fascinating place.

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.

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.

Despite my inability to qualify to qualify in South Africa, I did really appreciate the support I got from the IOC particularly the Olympic Solidarity, members of the ICF, my own National Olympic Committee, friends and athletes from the Slalom Community. When I got the wild card, it was the cherry on the cake that I could not have imagined. It was much more than I expected for myself.

People no longer know how to apologize, which is particularly noticeable among athletes, politicians, and entertainment figures.

I hate to say anything that may hurt UCLA, but I can't be quiet when I see what the NCAA is doing to Jerry Tarkanian only because he has a reputation for giving a second chance to many black athletes other coaches have branded as troublemakers. The NCAA is working night and day trying to get Jerry, but no one from the NCAA ever questioned me during my four years at UCLA!

It's important that athletes can compete on a level playing field. And youngsters coming into the sport can know that if they are working hard and training hard, they'll see a true reflection of where they stand and what they can achieve worldwide and not be swayed by people who are cheating.

Too many athletes do not admit their weaknesses.

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.

Creative people inspire me. Athletes also inspire me to come alive, especially my daughter, a competitive gymnast who works very hard, as much as six hours a day on her gymnastics skills.

My high school, like most high schools, had a pretty rigid stratification system. Kids were clustered into groups - the studious ones, the athletes, the popular ones - and we never crossed paths with each other. You stayed in your air-tight group, and you were suspicious of people in other groups.

A businessman needs a laptop. Athletes need massages and the right diet.

What I tell student athletes is first of all, you've made good choices this far in order to be able to be in college and to be an athlete. Keep making good choices.

Now, I talk to athletes who answer questions with a 'yeah'. I realize I used to do that. Or they answer very quickly and you stand there trying to come up with another question to ask. I've seen both sides and it's been very educational.

When someone is in a state of flow, that person's brain is not thinking about anything - it's just processing things through chunks at a total instinct level. Athletes in a state of flow describe knowing what will happen just before it does - knowing how a defender will react to a certain move an instant before doing it. Of course, if you know what will happen, you can succeed at doing it, so an athlete in flow has a stand-out game.

You're always struggling because you're not playing on a 53-and-a-third by a 120-yard field. You're not playing on a baseball diamond. With golf, every field is different and every atmosphere is different. The grass is different. The weather is different. You're outside. You're not in a stadium. There are so many different variables, so you never master golf. So, I think good athletes like a challenge.

The romance of circumvention is one of the most destructive forces at work in our society. The American Idol freeway to greatness, Instagramming one's way into popular consciousness with selfies of our ass folds beneath short shorts, human growth hormone and performance-enhancing drugs for athletes, Adderall for the idle mind, reality television that sacrifices our dignity for fifteen lousy minutes.

Athletes are extremists. When they're training, it's laser focus.

To be the best in your field is a great ambition, and requires discipline and a huge amount of effort. The athletes who possess this drive are the ones I am attracted to.

I always believed I was an ugly duckling in a family of swans, you know? I was such a black sheep, and it was the same way in high school... I was just kind of that awkward theater kid with a bunch of athletes... it was very Glee.

But I think there is a widespread opinion that the support system for athletes should be more firmly established.

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.

Athletes and actors do really crazy things and we do them under weird circumstances because we love what we do and because we take things in an extreme manner.

This is how many people become artists, musicians, writers, computer programmers, record-holding athletes, scientists... by spending time alone practicing what they love.

That is what great athletes can do: they give us a model of striving for human perfection.

Most of the time, I'm fighting guys who are 22 years old, former college wrestlers, athletes, kids who are in much better shape than me. Often people who are much bigger and wider than me. It can be dispiriting at first.

We lose a lot of young athletes because tennis is such a difficult sport. It's not like kicking a soccer ball.

I don't think some athletes understand how big it is to be an athlete, what they can do with just a simple gesture of shaking a kid's hand. It can make a fan's day. It can make a fan's life.

Ive always been really inspired by watching top athletes putting in peak performances.