Words matter. These are the best George Vecsey Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I never watch ‘Sopranos’ reruns back home. As far as I am concerned, the nuclear family is still sitting around the luncheonette in New Jersey, munching and chatting, safe and together, and that’s how it ended for me.
When Sweden’s Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.
Flo Hyman became America’s best-known volleyball player with a faulty aorta, but she did not know it.
I’ve seen elbows that broke eye sockets. I’ve seen a German goalkeeper just level a French guy. His teammates thought he was dead lying on the ground. This was in 1982 at my first World Cup. But a bite is outside any kind of contact collision: dirty foul play. A bite is a bite.
In North America, many fans know Cristiano Ronaldo’s smirk and can recognize Didier Drogba in a commercial. Maybe they know too much for the good of M.L.S.
I never worried about getting stale because the news and the people induce freshness every working hour.
Lots of ballplayers have their own personal music blasted by the sound systems in modern ball parks.
The football playoffs feature one-off affairs, without bad feelings building from weekend to weekend. In addition, football uses platoons for offense and defense and kicking, so only the interior linemen have a chance to really get up close and personal with one another.
I say the Islanders were the best team I ever covered because they had more so many stars who delivered with Canadian-Swedish-suburban modesty. And they won four straight Stanley Cups from 1980 through 1983.
Most descriptions make Beijing sound overbuilt: not a blade of grass left.
Certain Stanley Cup traditions remain intact, including the handshake line between players who had been belting one another for a couple of weeks.
Tom Seaver was let loose twice by the Mets and pitched a no-hitter for the Reds and won his 300th game for the White Sox, but he wears a Mets cap in the Hall of Fame as homage to the 1969 championship.
Television is making sports universal; for the same reason, big-time soccer is growing more popular in the United States.
What is there about basketball that makes Larry Bird or Lenny Wilkens want to coach after their playing careers are done?
Fans all have their memories of pennant races, good memories, sick memories.
Many American players – Paul Caligiuri, Claudio Reyna, Eric Wynalda, Kasey Keller, Tony Sanneh, Michael Bradley and Steve Cherundolo, just a partial list – have sought the income and challenge of Germany.
Some of the most inspiring moments in sports have come from players with physical defects. Tom Dempsey, born without toes on his right foot, kicked a 63-yard field goal in 1970, using a straighter, wider shoe.
For years, I have been harboring memories of my first major league game at a place named Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.
The Boys of Summer were heroes in Brooklyn for a full postwar decade partly because the players could not entertain higher offers.
Night tennis began at the United States Open in 1975 with certain stars trying to beg out and certain patrons trying to dump unwanted tickets on scalpers.
Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral – but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.
As my wife will attest, I do not shop casually.
Under a pulsating full moon, the gussied-up Billie Jean King National Tennis Center seems much softer and prettier at night, with the fountains bubbling and fans without tickets to the big stadium sitting in the plaza and watching a big screen.
One of the most beautiful sights in my neighborhood is on High Holy Days when people walk to temple. Not only does this bring the traditional legendary weather, but it gives off a psychic signal to slow down.
In August 1945, a former Army pilot with an artificial leg pitched five and a third innings for Washington against Boston. This would turn out to be Bert Shepard’s only major league game, and it remains one of the heartwarming moments in baseball history.
Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people’s favorite team.
War of attrition, war of wills. That’s what the Stanley Cup playoffs are – more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.
Hockey suffers from being compared to itself in ways that other sports are not. Every four years, some of us fawn over Olympic hockey, a great event with bigger rinks, minimal goonishness and national pride in addition to the heightened skills of veritable all-star squads.
Weary soccer players just cannot run anymore and must resort to shootouts after 120 minutes when a result is mandatory, but men on skates can go indefinitely, no matter how badly it disrupts the television network’s schedule.
Some people insist that hallowed professional teams should never change their nicknames.
There is always a group of death in any World Cup. And it’s a complement in a way to be in a group of death because it means that you’re a good team also.
I will always treasure the privilege of writing the ‘Sports of The Times’ column.
Pennant races drain the energy from the best of them. Old-fashioned baseball races are to me the most grueling daily test in any sport. Gotta keep coming out, every day, in the face of looming disaster.
Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River.
I love Boston. I love Fenway Park. I love Red Sox history. But in no way am I a Red Sox fan.
Why is the N.F.L. so popular? The N.F.L. grew in the comfort zone after World War II. People had money and time. A popular American sport got bigger.
I would never tell anybody to give up hockey – the great sports we have here – basketball, lacrosse – rugby coming into its own – we’ve got so many great team sports, and I say hold on to them.
No matter how many times it happens, the public always seems to be shocked when an athlete dies young, but the reality is, there are no promises.
There is only one thing wrong about the Flo Hyman Award: it came to be named for the Old Lady of Volleyball much too soon.
When Casey Stengel was putting his mark on all four New York baseball teams, he came off as many things. I have to admit I never thought of him as anybody’s uncle.
To this day, while maintaining a healthy respect for the Giants and Jets and other teams I cover, I admit to checking the results every Monday to see how the Bears did.
Youth sports could not exist without millions of volunteers and modestly paid coaches who teach our children how to skate and catch and dribble and also how to get along with others.
Some of us love hockey not just for its ferocity and skill but for its underlying code of civility off the ice.
There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did.
