Quotes by Sportswriters

There's such a thin line between winning and losing.
John R. Tunis
Well God is certainly getting an earful tonight.
Jim Murray
There's such a thin line between winning and losing.
John R. Tunis
The breakfast of champions is not cereal it's the opposition.
Nick Seitz
Here's a dime. Call all your friends.
Tom Meany
Where is it written in the Constitution that because a guy played football, he has the automatic right to sit in that booth? How hard is football? If I've spent thirty-five years as a sportswriter, you think I don't know you get six for a touchdown? You think I don't know that? You think I don't know you get three for a field goal? C'mon, c'mon. And I can actually speak English okay, so that would be a difference between me and a guy who spent his whole life playing football. Now, not all of them are like that, but it's that thinking that says, "We have divine right of booth." No, you don't. No you don't.
Tony Kornheiser
Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.
Roger Kahn
Eighteen holes of match play will teach you more about your foe than 18 years of dealing with him across a desk.
Grantland Rice
Football is violence and cold weather and college rye.
Roger Kahn
You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.
Roger Kahn
I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.
Roger Kahn
Pique or policy. We would never know.
Roger Kahn
Managing games comes second. Managing people comes first.
John Feinstein
Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didn't really know or like. Men from ghettos we didn't dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. There's nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps.
Roger Kahn
The world is your lobster!
Arthur Daley
Graduating from college doesn't mean you're smart, said Mike Mussina who graduated from Stanford in 3 1/2 years, but it does mean you're smart enough to know that having a college degree would be a good thing.
John Feinstein
Alex Rodriguez seemed not to fit in with the rest of his Yankee teammates. For instance, he wanted a clubhouse attendant personally assigned to him, when there were four or five for the whole team. Seeing the rift between him and the rest of the team and how Rodriguez's major focus on how HE was perceived, Joe Torre suggested in the individual meeting that Rodriguez at least get his own coffee rather than send someone to get it for him. Later that day, Alex Rodriguez made a point of telling the manager that he got his own coffee – drawing attention to himself, even in what was meant to be just an example of how he could fit in with normal behavior.
Tom Verducci
On Alex Rodriguez's difficulty performing in clutch situations, Joe Torre writes, "In key situations, he can't get himself to concern himself with getting the job done instead of how it looks. There's a certain freefall you go through when you commit yourself without a guarantee that it's always going to be good. There's a trust and commitment thing that has to allow yourself fail, allow yourself to be embarrassed, allow yourself to be vulnerable
Tom Verducci
You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.
Roger Kahn
I'm old, but I'm not good enough to be jaded.
John Feinstein
The flame of the inn is dim tonight,Too many vacant chairs.The sun has lost too much of its light,Too many songs have taken flight,Too many ghosts on the stairs.Charon, here's to you as man against man,I wish I could pick 'em the way you can!
Grantland Rice
The power of a boy's dream is one of life's little miracles, the way it wraps itself around the heart and remains through old age to the last breath.
Tom Verducci
(He) committed the cardinal sin in a college atmosphere not only of being different but of being different in a way that left a lot of people with the impression that he thought he was better than they were.
John Feinstein
Failure isn't bad if it doesn't attack the heart. Success is all right if it doesn't go to the head.
Grantland Rice