As an athlete, when you are on that field and the fans get really engaged and you can feel their energy and passion and true love of the game, it is absolutely a spiritual experience.
These athletes can be considered the gods in certain ways and the fans can be considered parishioners.
What's great about stand-up unlike athletes and other things when you get old you get old and rusty.
If you want to be a proud person, then you want to avenge your loss. For me it was [Josean] Serra and [Joe] Hughes, and for Michael Bisping, Henderson is one of his losses - one of his most painful losses. So I understand why he wants to avenge it. As an athlete I understand.
I'm an athlete, my job is not negotiating, it's not my field of expertise. I'm an emotional guy - it's normal, a lot of athletes are, and we're very susceptible to get our ego cut because of that.
I'm the biggest sports fan there is, I love sports, but I'm still convinced that it's teachers who deserve the big salaries, not athletes.
I could have skated by as an athlete, but the world is so much bigger and more interesting than any one thing. I didn't want to be pigeonholed as just a jock. I'm also an author, a student of history, and I collect memorabilia from the Wild West. I'm also a son, a father, and a friend.
I was especially impressed with Pauley Pavilion [at UCLA campus ]. The floors hadn't been laid down yet, when they gave me the tour, each new room got my heart thumping. They even had a surgical operating room in case an athlete was severely injured.
I was just starting out acting [doing "Airplane"] and wanted to be taken as a professional, not as an athlete doing a cameo.
The lifespan of most professional athletes is relatively short, and most have no preparation for doing anything after their career ends, which it could in an instant.
Common decency demands that [NCAA athletes] should be paid, but the only way it will happen is the same way workers got paid throughout American history, through a strong union.
A lot of the athletes moved away from boxing, into UFC - which I think is really crazy, where they elbow to the head and knee to the jaw. I think that's really a barbaric sport - but boxing is coming back.
Giving something back is a huge deal. You'll notice every successful athlete uses that at some point in his career during an interview. "I'm gonna give something back. Gotta give something back to the community." "Yaaaay! Right on!" People just fall for it. It's a necessary inclusion.
When someone is in a state of flow, that person's brain is not thinking about anything - it's just processing things through chunks at a total instinct level. Athletes in a state of flow describe knowing what will happen just before it does - knowing how a defender will react to a certain move an instant before doing it. Of course, if you know what will happen, you can succeed at doing it, so an athlete in flow has a stand-out game.
Tony [Walters] was one of the first international world-class athlete I had ever dealt with and I was lucky enough to have him as a coach and he taught me a lot about the mental aspects of training and competition.
I had some very fit people. I worked with a lot of athletes helping them, especially combat athletes, MMA fighters,[Dennis] Bermudez, [Chris] Weidman, and guys on the lower levels - boxers and MMA fighters.
People no longer know how to apologize, which is particularly noticeable among athletes, politicians, and entertainment figures.
Being an artist is like being an athlete. You have to be in there every day, keeping in shape. You have to be fearless. You have to be confident, and if you start getting thrown by criticism or esthetic terminology, you're going to fall off the balance beam and hit your head and do some injury.
I do identify with Olympic athletes quite a lot because they have to push to reach a certain plateau and some of them go on and some of them give up and some art - you know, some people are very talented in art and do a few amazing things and then give it up and go on and do other things, and others are in it for the long haul, more or less long-distance runners.
I think the biggest thing for all athletes is recovery - being able to bounce back from week to week, practice to practice, to come back in top form.
Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.
I still think that there's some kind of psychological investment in black athletes carrying the flag for "us" at times. So, sports [remains a] metaphor for struggle and triumph and flair.
Sport is cultural. What the star athlete does helps to define the culture. What the star athlete does on a Canadian team, especially if he or she is Canadian, helps define Canadian-ness.
I suppose the "dilemma" might come up if I see a black athlete from the U.S. squaring off against a white Canadian athlete. Who do I want to identify with? I certainly will not and cannot say that race determines how I see competition. I'm certainly aware of how race plays into the way others see and portray competition some times, but I don't have to invest in it that way myself. Unless it's boxing.
I think that a huge positive that's come out of me having successful competitions as an athlete has been that, through the years it's become less and less about personal victory and more about strengthening a platform for me to have a voice in the world and I could really talk about anything I wanted to and I've chosen to make my voice be heard and be recognized for some of the charities that I really care about and work very closely with.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: