We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football.
Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.
All winning teams are goal-oriented. Teams like these win consistently because everyone connected with them concentrates on specific objectives. They go about their business with blinders on; nothing will distract them from achieving their aims.
The dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within.
I tell the players that they can't relive any day in their lives and that they can't relive the minutes of a game, so they should make a great effort, a Mount Everest type effort, to live up to their potential. Success is a communal type thing, and if we win, then everyone can be considered successful and we can move uptown together.
Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.
An athlete experiences the emotions of pain and elation through triumph and defeat, through teamwork and individuality, as nothing more than a human being...that is the true glory of sport.
I think the Cowboys are one of only two teams in all of sports that engender love and hate to that extreme. The other is the Yankees. You love the Yankees or you hate the Yankees.
I think it's really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to - the beauty of playing baseball.