Top 70 Steve Rushin Quotes

I remember seeing Letterman do stand-up on ‘The Tonight Show.’ Or, it’s probably more accurate to say, I remember hearing him do stand-up, because the Carson show existed mainly as sound leaking under my bedroom door at night. I’d hear Johnny telling jokes and my dad laughing at them.

As a kid, I didn’t know that ‘All in the Family’ was satirizing male chauvinism or that Bobby Riggs was a self-promoting put-on. Many of us didn’t get the irony and went on making fun of women and girls who wanted to play sports, especially the same sports that men and boys traditionally played.

What’s the best baseball name of all time? Is it Champ Summers? Clyde Kluttz? Razor Shines? Scipio Spinks? Sibby Sisti? Creepy Crespi? Before you answer, consider that Coco Crisp is not even the game’s top Coco, an honor retired by Coco Laboy.

Golf balls are sweet: dimpled and sometimes even smiling.

Scarcity drives up demand, and the short golf season in Minnesota makes residents of that state mad for the sport. It’s the same reason ancient Scandinavians worshiped the sun: because they saw so little of it.

All kingdoms look small through an airplane window – little dominions built on quicksand. But looking up from the ground, where most of us stand, they’re rather impressive.

If you’ve never quit anything, you really ought to try. And if at first you don’t succeed, try again.

If you wonder why a man would shave before spending all day in his bass boat, you have never seen an angler’s face projected in high-def on the JumboTron at a Classic weigh-in.

In our house, the name for all athletic shoes – any that weren’t dress or ‘church’ shoes – was ‘tennis shoes,’ or ‘tennies.’

I’m a product of the 1970s.

There is something inherently foolish in soldiering on when there is no hope of payoff.

Football, played at its highest level, is catastrophic. Even relatively minor afflictions are grotesque and bookworthy.

The phrase ‘NFL combine’ always sounds redundant, because the league is a combine harvester, reaping and threshing everything in its path.

History is not just written by the winners; it’s written about them.

The only thing wider than my family’s mean streak is my family’s cheap streak.

Baseball consists of a million threads of dullness, on a loom of ennui, woven into a tapestry of tedium.

Yes, sports are very often very boring, which is good and necessary: If games were one long highlight, we wouldn’t have any highlights at all.

I’d watch the news with my dad, and he’d quietly mock the anchors. An anchorman might say, ‘Police are searching for…’ and my dad would say in the anchorman’s voice, ‘the man who gave me this haircut.’ This was in the real Ron Burgundy ’70s. And I would laugh and start doing it myself.

The first words Rebecca Lobo ever spoke to me when we met in a Manhattan bar in 2001 were, ‘Aren’t you the guy who just mocked women’s basketball in ‘Sports Illustrated’?’ I blushed, broke out in a flop sweat and said, ‘Yes.’

Swish: A made basket. Swoosh: The Nike logo. Swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh: A thousand coaches in nylon tracksuits, walking through hotel lobbies at the Final Four.

Growing up in Bloomington, Minn., I loved the ritual of dressing for Little League – in white socks, blue stirrups, belted pants, a double-knit jersey, and the cap I’d hold over my face to screen out mosquitoes in right field.

With each new pair of shoes, each new wrist-watch, each new Walkman or moisture-wicking wonder-material that runners put on, the sport became more alluring to me and to millions of others.

Humans had run barefoot for millennia, and some still preferred doing so in the modern Stone Age of the mid-20th century, when the handful of people running for exercise often wore whatever they happened to have on at the moment of inspiration.

I can’t stand another night in a hotel. Just being away. You miss the kids.

Sam Snead had perhaps the most stylish solution to the balding golfer: A snappy fedora that became his signature style, so much so that many never knew he was tonsorially bereft.

Everything gleamed or glinted on TV in the ’70s, from the ‘flavor crystals’ in Folgers coffee to the yellow dentures dipped in Polident and instantly restored to pristine, piano-key whiteness.

When people ask if Marquette University is in Michigan, and I tell them my alma mater is in Milwaukee, they sometimes say, ‘What’s the difference?’

Hype is supposed to overpromise and underdeliver, not overpromise and overdeliver. Usually, it doesn’t deliver at all – it takes your money and keeps your pizza.

Sports and fashion move so fast that I can’t possibly keep my ear to the ground. For one thing, my ear trumpet gets in the way.

The Metrodome was built for football. Fans seated down the third-base line at a baseball game faced centerfield, so that they had to turn and look over their right shoulders to see home plate.

I’d never had much interest in cool cars.

Though we endow them with human features – heads, faces, heels, toes – golf clubs are profoundly inhuman tools.

I had almost nothing published until I had something published in ‘Sports Illustrated.’ I started there as a fact-checker two weeks after I got out of college and was there for almost 20 years.

Compassion and empathy are anathema to sports.

Once upon a time in America, people aspired to party like a rock star. Now, rock stars aspire to party like a football owner.

Outside Buckingham Palace, the Royal Standard flies only when the reigning monarch is in residence. Sadly, there’s no similar flag outside The Woods Jupiter, which Tiger opened in the summer of 2015, spending a reported $8 million to make an upscale sports bar-and-restaurant in his image.

In 2007, Prince performed at the halftime of the Super Bowl. The stage in Miami was wreathed in purple light, and it poured during his performance, so that he played ‘Purple Rain’ in a purple rain.

Cinderella is older than she lets on. She’s ancient. She’s had work done. The Disney film was based on Charles Perreault’s French story ‘Cendrillon,’ published in 1697.

A great presidential address – Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Truman’s Farewell Address, Kennedy’s Inaugural Address – has the power to inspire.

I had started writing for ‘Sports Illustrated,’ which was really my dream job growing up. But the writing probably read like I was auditioning to write for ‘Letterman’ or ’70s-era Carson.

‘Uff da,’ for the unenlightened, is Norwegian for ‘oy vey’ and is a common expression in Minnesotese.

The most enduring Top 10 ever written wasn’t written at all, but chiseled onto stone tablets and conveyed down Mount Sinai by Moses, who introduced to the world not just a set of Biblical precepts but also a new format for starting arguments: the list of 10 things.

You never forget your first felony. Mine was mail tampering. As a hoops-crazed 13-year-old, I rifled through a new neighbor’s mailbox to confirm that the occupant of the split-level on 98 1/2 Street in Bloomington, Minn., really was former Gophers basketball star Flip Saunders.

Occasionally, Americans in large numbers are moved by a vanquished athlete’s grief. Larry Bird with a towel over his head in 1979 comes immediately to mind. But more often, sports fans do the opposite – they delight in the desolation of a defeated archrival.

Hurricane Irene’s advance coverage was heavy on worst-case scenarios. Thank goodness they didn’t pan out.

It’s one thing to wear jerseys at games, which fans have been doing in great numbers for 30 years, dressing as if they might be summoned from the stands on a moment’s notice to pinch-run. But those same jerseys are now omnipresent on airplanes, in restaurants, in doctor’s waiting rooms.

As a bald man who happens to play golf, or a golfer who happens to be bald, I’ll never know the pleasures of a golf visor.

Nouns are seldom improved by the modifier ‘public.’ Few of us, given a private alternative, prefer public restrooms or public transportation or public displays of affection.

My first interview at ‘SI,’ I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.

The man who consumes sports to the exclusion of all other things will never be well-rounded.

Solitary pursuits like playing video games and skateboarding can’t compete with the thrill of mobbing a teammate as he scores the winning run – nor do they end with a postgame trip to Dairy Queen.

My wife’s name, Rebecca Lobo, is on sandwiches and street signs in New England. It adorns the arena rafters at the University of Connecticut, where she first became a basketball star. Her high school in Massachusetts is on Rebecca Lobo Way, a nice trump card to play at reunions.

If you own face paint and a bulb horn and you’re not a circus clown, you might be uncool.

Quitting has always been the worst possible thing you can do in sports. It’s downright un-American.

We can project just about anything we want onto NFL owners – one of them is named Arthur Blank, for heaven’s sake. He’s a walking Mad Lib, just waiting for us to complete him.

In 1972, there was still a New York City law prohibiting women there from ‘furnishing refreshments to the audience or spectators at any place of public amusement.’ That’s right: Until the law was repealed in 1977, it was technically illegal for women to work as popcorn vendors in Madison Square Garden.