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.
It is of far more important that a man shall play something himself, even if he plays it badly, than that he shall go with hundreds of companions to see someone else play well.
I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master.
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.
But every fool describes, in these bright days, His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise,-- Death to his publisher, to him 'tis sport.
There are always in life countless tendencies for good and for evil, and each succeeding generation sees some of these tendencies strengthened and some weakened; nor is it by any means always, alas! that the tendencies for evil are weakened and those for good strengthened. But during the last few decades there certainly have been some notable changes for good in boy life. The great growth in the love of athletic sports, for instance, while fraught with danger if it becomes one-sided and unhealthy, has beyond all question had an excellent effect in increased manliness.
In representing criminal defendants - especially guilty ones - it is often necessary to take the offensive against the government: to put the government on trial for its misconduct. In law, as in sports, the best defense is often a good offense. The courtroom oath - to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - is applicable only to witnesses... because the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole entire truth.