#sports

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball. ↗

— James Patrick Murray

#anywhere #ball #baseball #curve #except

Boxing has become America's tragic theater. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#america #become #boxing #theater #tragic

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. ↗

— Helen Keller

#lived #miles #potent #smell #thousands

You can make a lot of money in this game. Just ask my ex-wives. Both of them are so rich that neither of their husbands work. ↗

— Lee Trevino

#ask #both #ex-wives #game #husbands

If I was invincible, maybe I would take up some extreme sports. ↗

— Tom Welling

#extreme sports #i #invincible #maybe #some

Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble. Young Gun ultrarunners were like Lost Generation writers in the ’20s, Beat poets in the ’50s, and rock musicians in the ’60s: they were poor and ignored and free from all expectations and inhibitions. They were body artists, playing with the palette of human endurance. ↗

— Christopher McDougall

#beat-poetry #sports-inspirational #art

This is what it means to be a fanatic - but a fanatic, that is to say, in a very special sense. It has little in common with the obsession of the politician or the artist, for instance, for both of these understand in a greater or lesser degree the impulse which drives them. But the sportsman fanatic - that is another matter entirely. His thoughts fixed solely on a vision of that mounted trophy against the wall, the eyes now dead that were once living, the tremulous nostrils stilled, the sensitive pricked ears closed to sound at the instant when the rifle shot echoed from the naked rocks, this man hunts his quarry through some instinct unknown even to himself. Stephen was a sportsman of this kind. It was not the skill needed that drove him, nor the delight and excitement of the stalk itself, but a desire, so I told myself, to destroy something beautiful and rare. Hence his obsession with chamois. ("The Chamois") ↗

— Daphne du Maurier

#hunting #sportsman #trophy #beauty

Plane Ride - In our sport it is natural and necessary to set up goals to inspire us. We all want to achieve the next level, the break-thru performance. What we (all of us) must not forget is that the journey to these goals is the best part. The daily process of obtaining success takes up the majority of our time and effort throughout our lives. Remember to appreciate what you’ve done in the past and what you are doing in the present on your way to higher goals. This will allow you to always strive for something more without missing out on the fact that your path to success is as much a starting point as it is a finish line. ↗

— Matthew Alan

#sports #swimming #inspirational

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face. ↗

— Dave Barry

#combines #down #face #fun #knocking

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies. ↗

— Simon Kuper

#sports #iraq