Let me be clear: Any new approach must ensure the integrity of the game. One of my most important responsibilities as commissioner of the NBA is to protect the integrity of professional basketball and preserve public confidence in the league and our sport. I oppose any course of action that would compromise these objectives. But I believe that sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated
Success isn't winning every time. A lot of different factors go into every race, and you can't control all of them. Success means doing as excellent a job as you can on that particular day. The people I admire most aren't necessarily the most wonderful athletes. I admire the ones who keep coming back and doing it, time after time.
Anyhow, I don't think Don King's a very good man. But then again, I doubt that a good man *could* succeed in his business. I'm sure boxing was a dirty sport before he came around. He may have just made it moreso. So that's about all I've got to say about him.
We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly.
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.
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.
Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.
The mellow autumn came, and with it came The promised party, to enjoy its sweets. The corn is cut, the manor full of game; The pointer ranges, and the sportsman beats In russet jacket;--lynx-like is his aim; Full grows his bag, and wonderful his feats. An, nutbrown partridges! An, brilliant pheasants! And ah, ye poachers!--'Tis no sport for peasants.
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.