5,260 Quotes About Sports

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.

I was quite fat as a kid. And swimming is a sport you can enjoy whatever size you are. If you're fat, running is a pain. I'm not really built for running.

A good life is a collection of happy memories.

The winners in life treat their body as if it were a magnificent spacecraft that gives them the finest transportation and endurance for their lives.

Doubters don't win, winners don't doubt.

The greatest communication skill is paying value to others.