Quotes from Steve Rushin

Giving someone shit, Rodney knew was a sign of love in Catholic families. And the same held true for Rodney and his friends. But he wished it weren't Keith's default setting, his auto-reply to everything.

Beyond that box camera he saw in a shop window in Chicago in seventh grade, Dad has never wanted anything, as far as I know. He still coos over the tennis balls and Old Spice we give him every birthday, Father's Day, and Christmas. And yet he understands the symbolic power that an earned object holds.

Childhood disappears down a storm drain. It flows, then trickles, then vanishes, leaving some olfactory memory—of new tennis balls, Sunday-morning bacon, a chemical cloud of Glade—to prove it ever existed. It seldom ends on a sixteenth birthday or an eighteenth birthday or some other calendar date, and rarer still is it stamped with a time of death. But sometimes it is.

There is no such thing as a carefree childhood, only a childhood that shifts the burden of care onto someone else. [Mom] is that someone else.

In dying, she allayed my greatest fear -- of death. Dying joined shoe tying and coat zipping and bed making on the long list of acts Mom demonstrated for her children, so that we could someday do it for ourselves.

In those days, tired of buying him tennis balls and socks and Old Spice for his birthday, we annually asked Dad if there wasn't anything else he would like. And he always said the same thing. He gathered us to his side—Amy and The Boys; one redhead and four shitheads—and told us that he already had everything he ever wanted. The car is just a box to keep it in.

At that hour, a shaft of sunlight shone through stained glass. Which is to say, windows whose glass was comprehensively stained—by a double-glazing of nicotine and automotive exhaust, and the secondhand smoke of a half-century of bullshit.

There is an irresistible impulse among the boys of suburban Minneapolis to kick a football as far as they possibly can. Even among the men. Mike McCollow's dad will come home from his dental practice, having stopped at the VFW hall for a brandy Manhattan en route, and drop-kick a half-frozen football between the uprights of two barren tree branches without even setting down his briefcase

The Sears Christmas Wish Book, thick as a telephone directory, was more than a catalogue of consumer goods. It was a glossy catalogue of children's dreams, a hard-copy rendering of an eight-year-old's id.

Between screams, Mom managed to cover the snake with a bucket, which she duct-taped to the floor, so that when Dad came home from work eight hours later in a suit and tie he found, in the dark, an enraged reptile—coiled and claustrophobic—waiting to strike. He just managed to slide a copy of the REO Speedwagon album You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't

I'd happily cover the British Open every year until St. Andrews slides into the sea or Scotland runs out of beer, whichever happens first.

Headline writers love the phrase 'Power Grab,' but you can't really grab it, can you? Power is a greased watermelon, a wisp of smoke, difficult to grasp, harder to hold, impossible to control while getting both feet down in bounds.

When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.

Anyone who thinks sports are ruled by athletes need only think of American sports' most enduring tradition: Immediately after a championship, as the champagne sprays and the confetti falls, the trophy is passed not to the team captain but most often to the team owner, handed to him by his highest-ranking employee, the league commissioner.

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.

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.

A lot of people say they eat, drink, and sleep sports, but does anyone really do it, ingesting nothing but Dodger Dogs and Soda Shaqs and Greg Norman Zinfandels 24/7?

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?'

For most of the twentieth century, a Minnesotan abroad could fix his home state in the cosmos by invoking for his hosts the name Charles Lindbergh or Bob Dylan, native sons who were claimed by the world and never really returned to the Gopher State.

Every era has its cartoon rich guys, but most of them are actual cartoons - Daddy Warbucks, Scrooge McDuck, C. Montgomery Burns.

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.

Trying to keep up is the ultimate act of uncoolness. And so I still retrieve not one but two daily newspapers from the driveway.

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

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.