Quotes from George Vecsey

There is nothing wrong with athletes coming back from retirement.

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.

Flo Hyman became America's best-known volleyball player with a faulty aorta, but she did not know it.

Title IX, whether voluntarily or via court cases, opened gymnasiums to women, produced uniforms and schedules and buses.

It needs to be said, over and over again, that Stan the Man was voted by 'The Sporting News' as the best baseball player of the postwar decade, from 1946 through 1955.

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.

The Boys of Summer were heroes in Brooklyn for a full postwar decade partly because the players could not entertain higher offers.

We all understand the economics of the Super Bowl - 10 or 12 minutes of the ball in motion will be stretched into three and a half hours or more of money-making commercials.

This occasional sports columnist, who has been to his share of Super Bowls, had been glad to be home on Super Bowl Sunday, but the scary commercials made me want to be in the melee of the arena, where you are not aware of commercials.

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 In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens.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.

Baseball cannot avoid conflicts. Games are played on Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. On Oct. 2, 1978, they played on Rosh Hashana, and Bucky Dent hit one into the screen at Fenway Park. Supply your own moral.

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.

Baseball's postseason shifts from game to game because of starting pitchers and the geography of the ballparks.

There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did.

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.

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.

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.

Newspapers are the engines that drive the Web.

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.

Lots of ballplayers have their own personal music blasted by the sound systems in modern ball parks.

In that prehistoric time, before the Internet, before information floated in the ozone, I was a soccer novice who had never heard of Socrates until somebody pointed him out - swarthy, shaggy, tall, slender, mysterious.

Certain Stanley Cup traditions remain intact, including the handshake line between players who had been belting one another for a couple of weeks.

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.