Photo: Nina MatthewsContinuing with my requests for famous quotations and sayings that might make it into the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations, I’d like now to ask for memorable recent (or not-so-recent) words of wit or wisdom from the sports world.
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“No matter how much you’ve won, no matter how many games, no matter how many championships, no matter how many Super Bowls, you’re not winning now, so you stink.”
“Success is never final, but failure can be.”
Both from Bill Parcells
Herman Edwards, then-coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, October 30th, 2002: “This is what the greatest thing about sports is. You play to win the game. Hello? You play to win the game.”
Prawn Sandwich Brigade:
“But at home they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don’t realise what’s going on out on the pitch” – Roy Keane referring to fans in the corporate boxes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawn_sandwich_brigade
On October 31, 2004, the Minnesota Timberwolves offered Latrell Sprewell a 3-year, $21 million contract extension, substantially less than what his then-current contract paid him. Insulted, he publicly vented his outrage, declaring, “I got my family to feed”.
Jim Mora, then-coach of the Indianapolis Colts, when asked about his team making the playoffs: “What’s that? Ah — playoffs? Don’t talk about — playoffs?! You kidding me?! I just hope we can win a game!”
“Its not over till it’s over”
or anything else Yogi
“Well, the first thing we do is we go in our meeting and we talk about we’re going to respect everyone; we’re going to fear no one. We’re not going to compare scores and we’re not going to listen to our fat little girlfriends.”
“[The coaches failed to make] our points more compelling than their fat little girlfriends. Now their fat little girlfriends have some obvious advantages. For one thing, their fat little girlfriends are telling them what they want to hear, which is ‘how great you are’ and ‘how easy its going to be’ and we had a bunch of people who wanted to win the football game but nobody wanted to play the football game.”
“That defies every level of work ethic that exists with regard to football. As coaches, we have to solve our failure on reaching them and the players have to listen. I am willing to go to fairly amazing lengths to make that happen. I don’t know if I will be successful this week or not but I am going to try and there will be some people inconvenienced and if it happens to be their fat little girlfriends too bad.”
-MIke Leach
“And let that be a lesson to you all. Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row”
- after finally beating Jimmy Connors at the 1979 Masters following sixteen straight losses.