Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I started at the Globe 40 years ago, there were seven newspapers in Boston and now there are only two. There were only three or four television stations in Boston and now there are a dozen.
You can't be Allen Iverson on a football team. And even Iverson got run out of Philadelphia when he was still a spectacular talent because the Sixers got tired of the headache and his bad attitude.
Journalists used to be obsessed with working at a New York magazine or newspaper or TV network. Now the entire industry is obsessed with going viral and how words will be received via social media.
I've been very fortunate to be involved in all the Super Bowls, to see some World Series, to cover heavyweight championship fights; I've been to the Olympics and seen every sporting event there is.
Since too few Americans go to the polls, I say what this country needs is a bobblehead election, where voters will get free bobblehead dolls of their choice when they show up and vote for president.
There were a lot of places, including Los Angeles, that didn't have major league baseball. There were other really large cities that had no major league teams, but at least they had college football.
I've been delivering these little homilies since 1980 - that's 37 years - and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries - and I trust you've hung onto every word.
But at the end of the day, in order for me to reach my full potential, I need an environment that allows me to be me... The executives at Fox Sports get and embrace me. Fox Sports allows me to be real.
You want to be leaders and you're black and I'm here to tell you how to do it. Disconnect from this social media garbage; disconnect from these celebrity athletes who don't really care nothing about you.
I'm a writer. I'm moonlighting on television. I never made any pretensions to that. As much as I like being on 'Real Sports,' I have been a writer since I was a little boy, and that's still my first love.
The only thing we know for sure about superiority in sports in the United States of America in the 20th century is that Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics teams he led stand alone as the ultimate winners.
I was fortunate to be part of a very successful show on CBS in 1986. I switched to NBC for eight years and through these experiences have gotten terrific insight into television; it's a fascinating medium.
As someone who has an affinity and passion for discussing racial and cultural issues, I made it a point to only discuss those issues when they really mattered and not turn the shows into Malcolm X Unplugged.
Because I lost a daughter, eight years old, to cystic fibrosis, I think that anytime that I'm dealing with people who, like Andrea Yeager, are trying to help those sick children, I identify very much with them.
We won. The media. We destroyed Barry Bonds, drove him crazy, turned the most disciplined and feared hitter the game has ever known into a fence-swinging hack, drained all the excitement out of his 714 home runs.
We've been doing a 40-year end zone celebration of the victories won by our parents and grandparents. We haven't shepherded our history. We haven't taught it so others can learn from it and implement the lessons.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a Southern, conservative minister who believed in the American promise. His dream was patriotic and traditional. Family, work, self-determination and religion comprised his core values.
The hardest thing in the world is to write something critical about someone and then show up the next day in the locker room. I mean, that is not fun, and that takes an awful lot of guts. And I never enjoyed that.
Order rooted in and maintained and restored by fear, intimidation, brutality and incarceration is immoral and untenable. Justice is order's intended soul mate. But serving justice is twice as hard as serving fear.
I don't understand blogs. People used to write to make money, no? You didn't give it away. I have nothing against blogs. I don't have a problem with them. But it's like, 'What are you doing? Why aren't you working?
And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don't have our best interests [at heart].
I didn't brown-nose my way here. I pulled out guns and shot my way here. So people don't mind shooting back. If I'd gotten here brown-nosing and playing all the political games, I'd probably be treated differently.
The Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons are there today as sure as they were when what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Would you rather have a basketball team, or would you rather be Detroit?
It's almost impossible to explain how little the NBA amounted to when I started covering it in 1963. It wasn't fair to call it bush, although everybody did. It was simply small - only nine teams - and insignificant.
We start 2016 with a command: that the subject of Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame is over, finis, kaput forever and ever. As sure as we will no longer discuss whether Lindsey Graham or George Pataki can be president.
For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.
The Masters is not greedy. You wanna buy a Masters souvenir logo shirt? Sure, let's go over to the nearest Ralph Lauren boutique. Oops, you can only purchase Masters memorabilia at the Masters, this one week of the year.
Putting a rheumatologist at the head of a committee that arguably was going to have more influence over brain research than any particular institution in the country at the time, I think a lot of people found surprising.
I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.
I can remember going to see the minor league Orioles. Until I was 15 years old, we'd go down with 3,000 people to watch them play the Syracuse Chiefs or the Jersey City Little Giants. That's what passed for Baltimore sports.
I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do.
True story: In the spring, my first in K.C., I'd written a series of columns in the Star demanding the Royals front office give fans discounted prices at concession stands as an apology for the 1994 strike. The Royals acquiesced.
There's no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matters, and not see that it's a Marxist political organization. It's not about Black Death. It's not about black men. It is a political move. It's a communist political move.
Steve Fisher did not like me at all. I was hyper-critical of him. I didn't think he was much of a coach. He just kind of rolled the ball out there and I was pretty outspoken about that. Steve Fisher and I didn't get along at all.
Before the Colts arrived in 1947, the best athlete in town was a woman duckpin bowler named Toots Barger. Football? The biggest games in Baltimore had been when Johns Hopkins took on Susquehanna or Franklin & Marshall at homecoming.
If I come on three days after the Super Bowl and say pretty much what everybody else has said, what's the point? That was the tricky thing... coming up with a new angle every time - or most times, because you couldn't bat a thousand.
What we accepted as great art - whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony - is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.
I'm talking about their supporters, and Donald Trump's support is coming from people who love Donald Trump, who unconditionally love Donald Trump to the point that they will risk their health and go to rallies with thousands of people.
Despite the fact that every sport this side of badminton worries about concussions that result in brain damage, CTE, the National Hockey League refuses to accept the overwhelming medical science. Good grief - the NHL still permits fights.
It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.
I grew up in Baltimore and that's why I root for the Orioles. I'm very suspicious of people who move and take on a new team. You should stick with the team of your youth all the way to your grave. That shows a sense of loyalty and devotion.
The wonderful thing about delivering sports commentary on NPR was that because it has such a broad audience, I was able to reach people who otherwise had little or no interest in sport - especially as an important part of our human culture.
I never saw war, so that is still my vision of manhood: Unitas standing courageously in the pocket, his left arm flung out in a diagonal to the upper deck, his right cocked for the business of passing, down amidst the mortals. Lock and load.
New York and San Francisco are distinctly different. San Francisco is driving the American media, not New York. You have young, microwaved millionaires and billionaires reshaping the American media in a way that reflects San Francisco values.
I don't own a gun. I'm a pacifist. I am a critic of commercial gangsta rap music. I don't believe you change people or their flawed perspectives from a distance. You open their minds from up close, when they realize you respect and love them.
I remember, when I was growing up in Baltimore, we'd get on a streetcar and go down to see the Orioles, and for a couple of bucks, you could get a pretty good seat. Kids can't do that anymore. So I think that changes the whole nature of sports.
The NBA Schedule was made up by one man, Eddie Gottlieb, who had owned the Philadelphia Warriors. Eddie had a Buddha-like body and a crinkly smile, and because he had also been an owner in baseball's old Negro leagues, he was known as the Mogul.
The only place where we're not segregated in mass is in sports. You go to a football stadium or a basketball arena, and all of America is there: the wealthy, the poor, the black, white, Latino, conservative, liberal, and we all talk about sports.
I think there are white alumni out there who wouldn't mind having an African American president of their school, but would be reluctant to have an African American coach, because he represents the school so. I think it's just sheer backward racism.
The stories that are most unfamiliar, the ones that seem to come out of the blue about people that aren't well known, usually come from producers that have really done a lot of homework and looked around. Other stories come from the correspondents.