I always had boyfriends, but I never imagined a proposal or a wedding. To me, that was like having a ball and chain round your neck.
I don’t believe you have to throw the ball 80 yards every play.
It is very hard to find a good defender who is strong and good with the ball. Very hard.
I’ve raised my girls in a sort of genderless fashion. I mean, I’ll take them to get their nails done – I actually love doing that – but I also play ball with them. As a result, my girls are tough and athletic and game for everything.
To this day, with all of these muscle-bound guys, nobody hit the ball further than Mickey Mantle, with his natural strength.
Working with children is a whole other ball game. They’re like little animals. You have to keep the camera turned on them all the time. Sometimes it takes a 41-minute take to get one sentence out in a believable way.
Some of the onus falls on us to make ourselves available for the ball, because we need to play inside-out. That’s when we’re at our best.
The cast called her Lucy, but everyone else called her Mrs. Ball. She was honest with people. If she liked you, you knew it. If she didn’t, you knew it, also.
There’s a way to win, and a way to play, and when you play like that, the ball’s moving and guys are looking for each other, the game is fun.
Golf challenges you mentally at any age, and when you become my age, it’s a challenge physically to try to make your game work as well as it ever did. That’s close to impossible, but that doesn’t keep you from trying to hit the ball where you used to hit it and make the putts you used to make all the time.
‘Wrecking Ball’ is a great song.
The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.
I worry when athletes are simply used by their universities to produce revenue, to make money for them, nothing to show at the back end. I grew up with a lot of players who had very, very tough lives after the ball started bouncing for them. And that’s why I’m going to continue to fight.
I think the first attacker has the ball, starts from the back, you can see everything, and you have to play with the feel of a midfielder, not a goalkeeper.
What do you remember about Jason Robinson? His feet. Not how improved he was under a high ball or his kicking skills. Everyone remembers those feet. He could go round you in a phone box.
Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard.
Great players must always produce and at any time or in any game. Give them a ball and a pitch, and they will show what they’ve got. That relaxed, calm spirit you don’t really have when you are young.
I had a sympathetic role in ‘thirtysomething,’ and in two weeks I’m going to do the role again. But in the movies, I just love the heavies. It’s much more fun. Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.
I loved playing football. In this particular match the ball happened to hit my right eye, the only one which I could see light and colour with.
I’d rather play in the major leagues and have some bad games than play consistently good ball in the minors.
I’m just a ballplayer with one ambition, and that is to give all I’ve got to help my ball club win. I’ve never played any other way.
Baseball can be slow in many ways. The action starts with when the pitcher delivers the ball. But the action really starts when the crack of the bat happens.
I’ve been shooting the ball and running a little bit. It’s just going out here now and forgetting that I’ve been out and try to get back in and make sure I know what’s going on out there on the floor and that we’re just not lost as a team.
Architecture has curled up in a ball and it’s about itself. It has found itself either as a freakshow, where you’re not sure if it’s good or bad but at least it’s interesting, or at the behest of forces of commerce.
When I don’t have control of the ball, what do I do? I press to get it back. It’s a way of defending. But more important is that I like to have the ball. That’s why I believe in individual coaching sessions to prepare players properly.
The way I grew up playing, and the way most Americans have grown up, is that you hit the ball up in the air and then it stops where it lands.
I play in front of 70,000 fans week in and week out, and I may drop the ball in practice, I may run the ball the wrong way, but once it’s game time, it’s game on.
In the split second from the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand until it reaches the plate you have to think about your stride, your hip action, your wrist action, determine how much, if any the ball is going to break and then decide whether to swing at it.
I was always a little hesitant to accuse people of loading a bat to hit a ball farther. I was always very hesitant to approach people because I never had any evidence that I had firsthand knowledge of.
You always want to have good balance. That’s the key to winning a Super Bowl. You look at the teams who have won championships, you got to have balance. So, to be able to run the ball effectively and throw the ball effectively is what gives you the chance to win a world championship.
I’m always amazed when a pitcher becomes angry at a hitter for hitting a home run off him. When I strike out, I don’t get angry at the pitcher, I get angry at myself. I would think that if a pitcher threw up a home run ball, he should be angry at himself.
The first thing I think of when I hear the name of Lucille Ball is a Hollywood legend. I have fond memories of growing up at her house, but she was a different person off the set than she was on the set.
What a ball from Frank. Frank and I go back years. He used to do that when I was at Ajax.
Generally, magicians don’t know what to say, so they say stupid and redundant crap like, ‘Here I am holding a red ball.’
The key for me is movement. When the ball comes into the box, or when the wide players get it, that’s where I have to be clever and make my runs. That’s where I come alive.
If I liken the Pacific War to a football match, I can say to you that the first half is over, we have kicked off after the interval, and we are going to carry the ball into enemy territory for a smashing victory.
I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.
Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it’s set a rolling it must increase.
The metaphor I’ve used is… somebody’s going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon, and I won’t be there to catch them. And that breaks my heart. But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall. So, I can curl up in a ball and cry, or I can get to work on the nets.
That’s the great thing about being an all-rounder. You can impose yourself on the game with bat and ball.
My feelings, as the last ball travelled over the net, and as I realized that the final match was mine, I cannot describe. I felt that here was a prize for all the games I had ever played.
As long as you don’t fold up and curl up into a ball, you’ll be all right.
That’s your dream, to play professional baseball. When you get the opportunity like that, getting drafted – especially by Oakland, a California team, pretty close to home – it was tempting. At the time, I just didn’t think I was ready or mature enough mentally or physically to start pro ball.
You have to take certain truths. One truth is that to have championship success in the NFL you have to learn to deliver the ball from the pocket.
My first year of pro ball I played in the Northwest league and made the all-star team, and the next year I played I led the team in hitting and was third or fifth in the league.
I’ve been going to soccer games since I was a kid. For me, soccer brought people together. You didn’t need money to do it. You needed one ball and your friends. That’s what’s so amazing about the game and why it’s so global.
A ball player has to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That’s why no boy from a rich family has ever made the big leagues.
When I was in baseball and you went into the clubhouse, you didn’t see ball players with curling irons.
I spent a whole year when I was injured just trying to get my arm back to the point where I could hit a tennis ball for more than 30 minutes a day. I’d hit for 15 minutes and it would feel as if my arm was going to fall off.
You automatically are trusting because not only is the person a friend, they are so incredibly gifted that you know someone is going to be able to hit the ball back to you across the net.
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
I felt really sorry for Oliver Kahn. Up to that point he had made lots of saves for the German team. Of course he could have caught the ball but it just happened. It was bad luck. In that situation, you need to be very strong psychologically to carry on.
Growing up, I wasn’t a big guy; I struggled to hold on to the ball.
