Quotes from George Vecsey

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.

I will always treasure the privilege of writing the 'Sports of The Times' column.

Into La Bombonera danced the most agile, rhythmic, beautiful, sensuous people I have ever seen. And that was just the fans.

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.

Stanley Cup hockey comes around every year, when games start to count in multiples of best-of-seven series, and the players seem to put more attention into every pass, every check, every annoying little trick.

It's a Stanley Cup thing. The boys mangle one another for a series, performing all kinds of nasty tricks, then they make nice, shaking soggy hands as the teams shuffle in opposite directions.

What I like about it is the creativity. When I watch good soccer players - the way they have to make a play out of nothing.

I love hockey because of the respect for history and for the game itself.

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've seen fire, and I've seen rain. I've also had to scramble over tundra to get to the Super Bowl and seen baseball turf fields that could fry a fielder's soles.

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.

I love Boston. I love Fenway Park. I love Red Sox history. But in no way am I a Red Sox fan.

For years, I have been harboring memories of my first major league game at a place named Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.

Some of us love hockey not just for its ferocity and skill but for its underlying code of civility off the ice.

Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.

I love Major League Soccer, covered the first game in 1996 in a funky stadium in San Jose, and I applaud just about every move that its commissioners, Garber and Doug Logan, have made.

Three of the brightest baseball pitchers of their times staged comebacks without much success - David Cone, Jim Bouton and Jim Palmer - but there was room to admire their quixotic gesture.

When I was working on the unauthorized biography 'Stan Musial: An American Life,' which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

Television is making sports universal; for the same reason, big-time soccer is growing more popular in the United States.

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.

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.

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.

Athletes are used to battling. The public would never learn their names if professional athletes had not shown courage at an early age. They learn they can overcome, but sometimes this becomes a false sense of security that leads them to the edge.

In New York, Kid Carter was pure vanilla for a city with stronger tastes.