You’re writing about young, vibrant people; there are wins and losses. In other words, it’s great drama.
She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.
Since too few Americans go to the polls, I say what this country needs is a bobblehead election, where voters will get free bobblehead dolls of their choice when they show up and vote for president.
What we accepted as great art – whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony – is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.
To write long pieces – or not even long pieces – to write stuff like the columns of Red Smith and people like that – they’re different then what it is today. Everything today is based on x’s and o’s. Inside baseball, it’s all, ‘Who’s gonna win?’ or you’re comparing things – it’s not as thoughtful as it used to be.
I’ll forever be grateful to NPR that they gave me such extraordinary freedom… It was 37 years of a fond relationship.
I do honestly believe that, in the 21st century, sport is the most significant cultural element in this imperfect world. It calls for serious attention.
The NBA Schedule was made up by one man, Eddie Gottlieb, who had owned the Philadelphia Warriors. Eddie had a Buddha-like body and a crinkly smile, and because he had also been an owner in baseball’s old Negro leagues, he was known as the Mogul.
The hardest thing in the world is to write something critical about someone and then show up the next day in the locker room. I mean, that is not fun, and that takes an awful lot of guts. And I never enjoyed that.
I don’t think there are many kids who sit around and want to be actors. I don’t think there are many kids who want to sit around and want to be senators. But so many of us want to be athletes, so we’re envious of them, and we put them up on that pedestal.
If there ever was an ‘America’s team,’ it would be itty-bitty, little Green Bay, stuck way up there somewhere, owned by the salt-of-the-Earth citizens themselves.
People often lump radio and television together because they are both broadcast mediums. But radio, anyway, and the radio I do for NPR, is much closer to writing than it is to television.
NPR allowed me to treat sports seriously, as another branch on the tree of culture.
Nothing made me happier than to hear from literally hundreds of listeners who would tell me how much the commentaries revealed about a subject they otherwise had never cared much for.
The Masters is not greedy. You wanna buy a Masters souvenir logo shirt? Sure, let’s go over to the nearest Ralph Lauren boutique. Oops, you can only purchase Masters memorabilia at the Masters, this one week of the year.
I get very envious of my general news colleagues who are always being handed sexy new stuff like global warming, China, and Donald Trump, while my sports colleagues and I must be eternally satisfied with the same old home-court advantage, soccer, and momentum.
You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
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