SPORTS QUOTES

Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

In 1925, the central committee of the Soviet Communist party declared that sport should be consciously used "as a means of rallying the broad masses of workers and peasants around the various Party Soviet and Trade Union organizations through which the masses of workers and peasants are to be drawn into social and political activity." Fortunately, people of all nations intuitively tend to resist such exhortations. They know that games remain gloriously pointless and that watching an exciting athletic contest, moreover, can be emotionally almost as exhausting as participation itself—hardly the "passive" experience it is made out to be by the guardians of public health and virtue.

For serious problems you should schedule two sessions a day: half an hour before lunch and half an hour before dinner. Write them down in your engagement book. Give them priority. […] For less serious problems, ten minutes morning and night will get you into trim and keep you there. Or twenty minutes once a day, if that fits your schedule better. And don’t forget the while-you’re-doing-something routines. You can be pampering your body most of the day if you remember them, and your body will be very grateful.

Todo el mundo quería follarse a Tidiane. Era un hecho inevitable, le pasaba desde que era un muchacho, pero es que últimamente el acoso era más duro, tanto en la calle como en el campo, tanto fans quinceañeras como sus compañeros de juego.

These boys would be better off hog-tied than playing for a woman!” shouted another. The discordant men gathered at the back exit. Moonshiner opened the door and they poured out, while inside we could hear in the distance the sound of a plane flying into our airfield. We knew another body was likely on board, this time carrying the remains of a soldier from a neighboring town.

I’m no different. If another player gets under my skin, I want to punch his face in. But if I’m chasing him around, trying to hurt him, I’m not doing my job. Better to get him chasing me and then he’s not doing his job. That makes me an agitator.

This has been a story about ice rinks and all the hearts that beat in and around them. About people and sports and how they sometimes take it in turns to carry each other. About us, dreaming and fighting.