Quote Sport Unquote
By John Barber
Copyright 2011 John Barber
Smashwords Edition
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Referees, the Press and Officials
Introduction
Play up! Play up! and play the game. Henry Newbolt
This book is an offshoot of a similar book which is a collection of insults. A lot of the quotes came from the world of sport so it seemed a logical step to widen the scope.
Both books had their origin in a project about Great Britain during the 1980’s, so many of the quotes are rooted in that decade and are predominantly from British sportsmen and women. I have also drawn on letters written to the national press, occasional news items and some literary verses all with a strong British bias. This wasn’t how I intended the book to be but I found that any sport played outside of these islands was a completely different ball game.
I suppose that is how others see us. What has emerged is a sort of snapshot of Britain viewed from the perspective of its sporting heroes. But more often than not, its failures.
It also became very apparent that other nations especially the Americans, see sport as completely different from the British. The Americans use terms that are very aggressive whereas the British see playing sport, any sport, as being life itself – played to the rules.
The quotes are listed alphabetically by author in each section (with some editorial exceptions) but it is more of a book to pop into now and then rather than read from starting line to final whistle.
American Football
American Football is not a contact sport. Dancing is a contact sport, football’s a collision sport.
Mike Ditka, Chicago Bears coach
Winning isn’t everything - its the only thing.
Vince Lombardi, coach Green Bay Packers
I resigned because of illness and fatigue. The fans were sick and tired of me.
John Ralston, Coach, Denver Broncos
They don’t take the Marines and train them on the beach with ice cream in their hands and then tell them to fight. We’re preparing these guys for eleven individual wars. That’s what it amounts to.
Dick Vernell, coach Philadelphia Eagles
You can’t train the way I do and go out with girls.
Joaquim Cruz, churchgoing baptist, teetotaller and Brazil’s Olympic 800 metre gold medallist
Apart from becoming sweaty and uncomfortable, trainers are not designed for long periods of wear. The sole and midsole wear out too quickly. After about a month you might as well be wearing plimsolls.
Vivian Grisogono, chartered physiotherapist
I don’t have a Daley Thompson complex. Someday I’ll beat him, I’m sure. Of course I may be 80 by then
Jurgen Hingsen
The Americans should be ashamed of themselves, letting negroes win their medals for them. Do you really think that I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a negro?
Adolf Hitler on Jesse Owens
The French cannot produce great track and field teams like it can produce great wines for probably that very reason. The winemakers got in first.
Michel Lourie, French national coach
There was so much barging and shoving; it was like trying to get into a Glasgow pub on a Saturday night.
Tom McKean
I don't really see the hurdles. I sense them like a memory.
Ed Moses
I went through a stage of feeling awful to one of feeling terrible. Once I started to feel terrible I was OK.
Steve Ovett on the California Mile
In my first marathon I got excited, even euphoric. It was a feeling I never had on the track. On the road competitors hand around sponges. In a 5,000 all they give you are elbows.
Dick Quax
Running doesn't make anyone immortal. It doesn't bestow or confirm identity. And it can't infuse meaning and purpose into lives that are otherwise unfulfilled.
Dr Richard Restak, neurologist, speaking after the death of Jim Fixx, credited with popularising jogging
Stella was a very nice person, very quiet. But I only saw her on the mount, never in the changing rooms or in our hotel in Los Angeles.
Hilda Sisson on Stella Walsh who was discovered to have no female sex organs after a post mortem which was conducted when she was shot dead outside a store in Cleveland. Sisson was beaten into second place by Walsh who won the gold in the 1952 Olympics
I'm just a normal Aussie guy who likes a smoke and a drink. I wish they'd had the final between 2am and 4am. I might have won.
Jai Taurima, on his non-athletic lifestyle
When I lost my world record I took it like a man; I only cried for ten hours.
Daley Thompson
I haven’t been this happy since my grandmother caught her tit in a mangle.
Daley Thompson
One reason that Finland produces such great runners is that back home it costs $2.40 for gas.
Esa Tikkanen, Finnish marathon runner.
There is no secret to running - run hard, have a beer, have a pizza. We make it too complicated.
John Walker
Baseball
Rounders is an outdoor bat-and-ball game played between two sides each of nine players. The ball is bowled under-arm, and the batsman's aim is to hit the ball far enough to enable him to run as far round the circuit of the pitch as possible. A complete circuit, round four bases, counts as a run, a 'rounder'. The game has for a least a century been generally regarded as a schoolgirl's pastime, for which reason rounders remains one of the most useful sticks with which to beat uppish Americans, who are usually maddened on being reminded that in rounders lie the roots of baseball.
Christopher Mathew. Benny Green annotated notes to Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome.
I called off his players names as they came marching up the steps behind him. .. All nice guys. They'll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.
Leo Durocher, US Baseball coach, usually misquoted as 'Nice guys finish last.'
Someone once said that we are one nation divided by a common language. Not so. The Americans speak a completely different language. The translation of the following headline follows.
Gung Ho Dodger Rookie Sax Old Infield's Brassy new Cog
Gung Ho - enthusiastic
Dodger - player on Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team
Rookie - First year man in the league
Infield - collective noun for four close in-fielders
Old - infield group has not changed for several years
Brassy - brazen
Sax - players name
New - new
Cog - key member
Hence: Sax, an enthusiastic and brazen first year player with the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club will be a key member of the teams veteran close fielders. I think the Americans edge it by 26 – 10.
Basketball
They beat you up in the first half, pray for you at half time then beat you up in the second half.
Opposition basketball coach on his reaction to the Athletes in Action (God Squad)
The main reason I'm disappointed in the young people in this league is because they look at Michael and they don't understand him. They see the greatest, but they don't know why he was so great. They miss the point. They don't remember or realize that when he first came into the league all he did was drive and dunk on everybody. He worked hard to add a jumpshot, the three-point shot, the post-up moves, the passing, the defense, and the leadership. There are so many guys in the league who don't understand the progression of his greatness. They don't realize that he evolved into what he is now through hard work and tremendous dedication.
Magic Johnson on Michael Jordan
There are people who get up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and work five straight days. We don't have it bad, do we?
Charles Oakley, Toronto Raptors forward after hearing of numerous complaints from other NBA players about playing games on three consecutive nights.
Quit fouling like a wimp. If you’re gonna foul, knock the crap outa him.
Norm Stewart, Missouri Tigers
Bowls
There is plenty of time to win this game and to thrash the Spaniards too.
Sir Francis Drake
Boxing
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
Muhammad Ali
I told you all I would do it, but did you listen? He was scared, he was humiliated. I told you I was the greatest heavyweight of all time. I kept telling him during the fight to show me something, to come on and punch. Come on, you’re the champion! Show me something.
Muhammad Ali on George Foreman, 1974
I am the greatest.
Muhammad Ali
These people want to ban boxing because black people are now in control. All the champions are black. Many of the promoters and managers are black. When we had all the white champions, they never talked about stopping it.
Muhammad Ali
Marciano played a different sport from Cockell. He butted unmercifully, he hit with his elbows, he hit low. A British referee would have sent him to his corner after three rounds.
Eamonn Andrews
What did I learn from my defeat? Not to come out for the 11th round.
Frank Bruno
Boxing's just show business with blood.
Frank Bruno
You could have set him to music when he was performing in the ring with a grace and style that was almost ballet. Until he let fly with his ferocious combinations that owed more to ballistics than ballet.
Henry Cooper on Sugar Ray Robinson
I’d like to retire with my brains still in contact.
Errol Graham
All fighters are prostitutes and all promoters are pimps.
Larry Holmes
I’m 35 fighting young men. Rocky Marciano was 25 and fighting old men. Rocky couldn’t carry my jockstrap.
Larry Holmes
This country would be in good shape if everyone got off their arse and did the sort of job Frank did the other night.
Terry Lawless, Frank Bruno's trainer
I note from Frank Keating’s piece on Frank Bruno that Terry Lawless thinks that this nation would be in good shape if “everybody got off their arse and did the sort of job Frank did the other night.” I’m as patriotic as the next man, but if the way to put the Great back into Britain is to let hordes of Americans come over here to beat us all senseless, then I’ll beat Ian Botham to the front of the queue outside Australia House.
William Pennyman, Letters Page, the Guardian
'I had a brainwave but decided to sleep on it. It’s a new idea to take the aggression out of sport. Non-aggressive boxing ' said Tom, taking of mouthful of McBlane's exquisite red cabbage. 'Each person hits himself instead of his opponent.'
'That's a very interesting idea' said Reggie.
'Knock out,' said Tony.
That's exactly what it won't be,' said Reggie. 'Well done Tom'
The second bout began sensationally. The businessman who answered to the name of Edwards rushed into the middle of the ring, hit himself violently in the balls, cried 'below the belt you swine', and collapsed in a groaning heap.
David Nobbs, The Better World of Reginald Perrin
As long as an American’s standing after three rounds it’s hard to get a decision.
Redzep Redzepovski, Yugoslavian boxer and Olympic silver medallist
In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame.
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains.
Paul Simon, The Boxer
The harmless act of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the United States.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I was appalled and ashamed by the violent scenes at Wembley after the Alan Minter fight on Saturday. When I go along for a quiet evenings entertainment throwing beer cans I do not expect my enjoyment to be ruined by the sight of two grown men beating the living the living daylights out of each other.
Paul Skirrow, Letters Page, the Guardian
No, I don’t mind the fight being at three in the morning. Everyone in Glasgow fights at three in the morning.
Jim Watt
He likes to go to bed early, so tell him to bring a blanket. He can have it placed over him in the ring.
Tim Witherspoon on Frank Bruno
Conkers
I have trained two runners-up and one champion. I was champion myself in 1970. I train them with Double Diamond. If they can drink 18 pints they can play conkers. No women of course. Its too dangerous.
John Hillyard
At the end of the day it depends on your conker. The bloke that won hadn’t done any training. I had a duff conker. The weather conditions were against me. The wind kept blowing my conker about. And I had nerves. That’s what really cost me the match - nerves. And that duff conker.
Melvin Skelton, defeated finalist, World Conker championship
Cricket
It is commonly held that football, the one played with the round ball, is the national sport of Great Britain, as it is in many other countries.
However, no other sport captures the quintessential English spirit more than cricket.
The rules of cricket are virtually unintelligible to anyone other than those who play it; the lbw rule is infinitely more esoteric than the offside law in football. Try describing a googly, or a leg break to a foreign visitor over the after dinner mints. Why should anyone want to bowl a maiden over, or score a duck? What kind of team has square legs, short legs, long legs, silly points and needs a third man when there are already eleven out in the field?
‘It’s just not cricket’ and ‘play a straight bat’ illustrate how we believe that the game, just like life itself, must be played. According to the rules. There is no place for cheats: if you clipped the ball to a fieldsman you walked. You didn’t wait for the appeal, or for the umpire’s straightened finger.