#sportsman

Professionalism is not sportsmanship. If you don't succeed, you won't be in your profession for long. In our society, it's not about good or bad. It's about who's on top. ↗

— Chili Davis

#bad #good #long #our #profession

Sportsmanship and easygoing methods are all right, but it is the prospect of a hot fight that brings out the crowds. ↗

— John McGraw

#crowds #easygoing #fight #hot #methods

Someone who doesn't make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn't act like he'd just become king of the world, either. Athletes in my day were simply humble in our victory. I believe we were more mature then...Maybe it's because the media puts so much pressure on athletes; maybe it's also the money. In my day we competed for the love of the sport...In my day we patted the guy who beat us on the back, wished him well, and that was it. ↗

— Louis Zamperini

#sports #sportsmanship #track #love

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