Quotes About Athletes

It's kind of mind-blowing what some of us adaptive athletes can accomplish as far as physical sports.

As female athletes all over the world have discovered the hard way, changing cultures and mindsets takes action.

Both of my parents were both multi-sport athletes. Their mindset was, be an athlete as long as possible, up until they became parents. And so they dropped their dreams for their children.

This is the NBA; you can't stop everybody from scoring 30. But that 30? They're going to work for every point they get. And that's my mindset.

It's a must for us to get higher education since athletes seem to be contended with being good in training and in their events, happy where they are. But I try to change that mindset, let them be aware of other things and grow as a person.

The amount of players who get into trouble in the NFL is a very small minority, but they are the ones who make the headlines.

For many young people growing up in minority communities, there is a sense that their lives are disposable. As athletes, we have a platform to let those kids know that their lives are important. That their lives matter to us.

There is, however, an important corollary to this idea: Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you'll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.

musicians, athletes, and chess players, among others, know all about deliberate practice, but knowledge workers do not. Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller's obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that's more mentally demanding?

In the weight room before a game against the Expos, pitcher Rick Sutcliffe asked Bill where his seats were. The answer was: "Up among the weird and the damned.

Chemical cheating will be decisively routed when fans become properly repelled by it. They will recoil in disgust when they understand that athletes who are chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued.

There are a lot of sports that New Zealand does very well but MMA is a truly global sport and it's practiced in the farthest reaches of this earth.

We have a rich tradition here in the United States of great decathletes, which is amazing 'cause we have absolutely no program to develop these guys. Zero. There's nothing. They do it on their own, just like I did back in '76.

In a given year, there may be two or three NFL-ready quarterbacks at the college level. In another year, there literally may be zero.

There's a lot of dancing in football. You can see Victor Cruz doing a little bit of a cha-cha or samba move in the end zone. You can see Terrell Owens getting his popcorn ready. You can see Ochocinco doing the riverdance. But not so much when it comes to ballroom.

One of the things that I've always not liked is the modern players have always concentrated on dancing in the end zone and BSing when serious things were going on in this country that needed to be changed. So my opinion is that when these young people stand up and risk their careers, that's a good sign for everything and all of us.

The days of the heavyweight champion as civil rights leader are long gone. You think you'd see Ali rolling around on the floor of an ESPN Zone? I don't think so.

I don't know how to put this, but to some people, the NFL is basically modern-day slavery. Don't get me wrong - we get paid a lot of money. There's a sense of 'shut up and play,' that this is entertainment for other people. Then, when we go out in public, we're like zoo animals. We're not human beings.

Some college athletes don't want to turn pro, they don't want to take the cut in pay.

No doubt about it. For every player. Thursday nights are very tough for us because it is a short turnaround.

I am basically turning football players into sprinters for a while. When we first talked about it, I didn't know how my expertise could be used.

Castro was always using his athletes as a way of symbolically defeating the United States in the ring, and after these Cubans defeated Americans in the ring, they were turning down exorbitant sums to leave the island.

But 30 is a turning point in most footballers' lives - because your market value starts to fall.

As it turns out, just hanging out around athletes doesn't actually make one more fit.