Quotes About Athletes

The beauty of all these years of singing the anthem is that I got a chance to meet athletes that I love, and there was a mutual respect.

The NBA definitely has some trendsetters that stay up on the latest fashion, but I think you're starting to see guys like myself and others get some much-deserved respect in the style department.

Great coaches are great humanitarians. They really care for the athlete as people first and athletes second. This is paramount in gaining respect.

When I was fighting Tyrell Biggs, Tyson was telling me at ringside to hit him to the ribs. We always had a mutual respect for each other since we sparred those early times. We got that over with.

I'm not gonna lie, I love Usain Bolt and Serena Williams. What I love about Serena is that she just gets on the floor and she dominates. She handles her business very well, I respect that.

I don't think I look up to any players. Obviously you respect everyone.

Many say that (Pete) Sampras is the greatest player. But I say with all due respect to the rest, that he (Roger Federer) is the most complete player in the world so far.

To be sure, [NASCAR] stars were initially ex-bootleggers for the most part drawn from that talent pool in the Carolinas hills: "good ol' boys" as they referred to themselves. That's exactly how they would be described in the press that slowly became enamored with their raucous life style. That has all changed, with the drivers of today polished and clean-cut athletes who are expected to behave like commercial puppets in public.

Unlike conventional jocks, who tend to sell aluminum siding and give canned speeches to parochial-school athletic banquets in the off-season, race drivers never shuck their image when they leave the stadium. They are supposed to be zany, nomadic soldiers of fortune who are involved in wild endeavors during every waking moment.

How can you think and hit at the same time?

I think marriage and athletes is a bad combination.

I think the Americans are ready to play, they want to beat us. I think that players like Chris Chelios and his leadership over there goes a long way.

My job is to teach them to believe they could perform better than they realize. Great coaches teach athletes to go beyond the barriers.

The families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.

I made it a point to recruit only subjects who had trained extensively as athletes, dancers, musicians, or singers. None of them ever quit on me. So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.

Our best intentions are often thwarted by external forces - forces that we ourselves set in motion long ago. Decisions, especially bad ones, create their own kind of momentum, and momentum can be a bitch to stop, as every athlete knows. Even when we vow to change, even when we sorrow and atone for our mistakes, the momentum of our past keeps carrying us down the wrong road. Momentum rules the world.

I've found that my athletes run their best races after about 10 weeks of intense training.

For most footballers, they just have to give their all for 90 minutes two times a week, and apart from a few training sessions spend the rest of the time resting. They only train intensively for six weeks before the new season.

Because muscle is heavier than fat, dancers weigh more than you might think, but they are usually very lean.

To have the athletes weigh in on a stage, televised, it makes no sense. Holding us at weight to run us through medicals and a staging process, it lengthens the time we're depleting ourselves.

Amazingly, I think that a lot of times athletes are - are kind of in a position where other think they shouldn't weigh in on certain social topics.

Look at rugby, the national sport, you have guys weighing 130kg, 140kg, who can run like sprinters full clip into each other causing brain damage constantly on that field.

I think they need to start doing cageside weigh-ins again. I think that's the best way to go if you really want to see some difference. Cageside weigh-ins; I guarantee you won't see people cutting more than five to eight pounds, and they'll be fighting closer to their natural weight class.

I love watching Anthony Kim play, but I'm not a fan of the way he grips down a good two inches on his full-swing shots. Choking down lightens the club's swing weight and effectively makes the shaft stiffer. It also makes it difficult to hit the ball high enough for all situations.