All good athletes make mistakes; the great ones learn to make that mistake only once.
When I broke into professional hockey at 17 I was told that I was too small and too slow and I wouldn't make the NHL. Now it's kind of flip-flopped and the sense is I can't be a good coach because I was a great athlete.
I don't believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models.... It's not like it was when I was growing up. My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be. If I didn't like it, they said, Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Parents have to take better control.
The team with the best athletes doesn't usually win. It's the team with the athletes who play best together.
As an athlete, I understood the value of my health insurance. I knew that in my profession, injuries were common and could happen at any time.
The athlete who is building muscles though weight training should be very sure to work adequately on speed and flexibility at the same time. In combat, without the prior attributes, a strong man will be like the bull with its colossal strength futilely pursuing the matador or like a low-geared truck chasing a rabbit.
The Olympics are every four years and I think every athlete who competes in the Olympics wants the gold medal, and I think that's what the World Cup is for a rugby player - it's the gold medal.
Athletes that can't listen, can condition.
One day or another every athlete feels like taking it easy. He stops trying to exceed his limits, and thinks he can keep winning because of his lucky star, or the bad luck of his opponents. You must overcome this negative instinct, which affects all of us, and which is the only difference between the person who wins a race, and those who lose. This is the battle you have to fight every day of your life.
Stop saying athletes do it for the love of the game. They do it for the love of their 32-room mansion with the live shark tank in the living room. If pro sports paid minimum wage, Shaquille O'Neal would be a bouncer at Scores, and Anna Kournikova would be a mail-order bride from Minsk.
I don't rate myself as a fantastic, talented athlete. I just have perseverance. I'm a cart horse. I work hard.
There is no greatness without passion to be great, whether it's the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson.
I want to be remembered as the guy who gave his all whenever he was on the field.
Being your best is not so much about overcoming the barriers other people place in front of you as it is about overcoming the barriers we place in front of ourselves. It has nothing to do with how many times you win or lose. It has no relation to where you finish in a race or whether you break world records. But it does have everything to do with having the vision to dream, the courage to recover from adversity and the determination never to be shifted from your goals.
In most sports they have a physical effect on your performance, in swimming only psychological. If you worry about what your rival is doing, you take your mind off what you are doing and so fail to concentrate on your performance.
A lot of athletes have this sort of invincibility: [The jellyfish] should worry about me. I don't worry about them. I'll just swim right through them.
I don't believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models.
I've never thought of the Olympics as a political statement. I really think a boycott ... is in the wrong as far as the athletes are concerned.
I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I'd learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint.
Being an athlete is a state of mind which is not bound by age, performance or place in the running pack.
If you have a body, you are an athlete!
The reports of racial episodes are disturbing. But the players' protest is exhilarating because it is the most high-profile example to date in a continuing revolution in which the athletes who drive the multibillion-dollar college sports machine have begun to use their visibility to demand change.
As inherently franchise-altering as drafts are, as monumental as they can be in the sport's history, you still can't get past the fact that this is several hours of people wearing suits and reading names off a sheet of paper. The athletes' clothes are entertaining - though not as much as they once were - and there's a warmth you get from watching young men and their families have their dreams come true. But it's still just a televised committee meeting.
If every university president said, 'The revenue producing sports: basketball, football - potentially revenue producing at most universities - maybe in a few cases women's basketball, if every one of them had a monitor that reported directly to the university president and no 'student-athlete' ever gets into this college or university who could not plausibly be admitted if we did not have a football or basketball team, end of problem. It won't happen because it's like unilaterally disarming. You know your opponent won't do it and then you'll get crushed in every game, but it's a simple thing.
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