We used to flock to watch gladiators, public torture and executions. In more recent times, our appetite for mortal violence has been sublimated in sports, photorealistic video games, film and literature.
I think what endurance sports teach you is to stay dedicated, stay focused, and also to understand you're going to have ups and downs, but you need to keep running right through them.
There were always plenty of newspapers in the house. 'The Times', 'Guardian', 'Daily Telegraph' and 'Daily Mail' were all regular fixtures on the coffee table. I used to enjoy reading 'The Times' editorial pages and the 'Daily Mail' sports pages.
For watching sports, I tend to drink Guinness; early evenings always begin well with a Grey Goose and tonic with plenty of lime; and on a cold winter's night, there's nothing quite like a glass of Black Maple Hill... an absolute peach of a bourbon.
In America, we have three major sports - baseball, football and basketball. They get the most coverage. Then there's things like golf which mop up most of what is left. But track and field? We are way at the bottom of the totem pole.
I would say my first golf memory was asking who Arnold Palmer was when he was always on the Pennzoil commercials. When I was a little kid I watched a lot of sports, but I didn't watch a lot of golf, and this guy was always on a tractor.
The more expensive and/or exclusive a sport, the whiter it tends to be: the fact almost has the force of a law. That is the main reason why the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific islands excepted, was so desperately white, the Springboks included.
Where the costs of entry are minimal, there is a wide avenue of opportunity for those with little or nothing, which is why football is just about the most democratic sport of all: African and Brazilian footballers compete on a level playing field wit...
My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.
People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is...
The tennis ball doesn't know how old I am. The ball doesn't know if I'm a man or a woman or if I come from a communist country or not. Sport has always broken down these barriers.
When I'm directing actors, I often find myself slipping in sports metaphors, like: 'Don't go for the punch line here, just put it up on a T-ball stand so she can hit it out of the park.'
As you become a legend in the game, you build more doubters than you build supporters. And that's fine. I think that comes with anything that's challenging. I think it even comes with sports. The older that Michael Jordan got, I think the more doubte...
They should have a rule: in order to be a sportswriter, you have to have played that sport, at some level; high school, college, junior college, somewhere. Or, you should have had to have been around the game for a long time.
Males have probably always enjoyed watching the defeat of other males, but without the invention of numerals and the subsequent invention of the concept of keeping score, we could never have had a million sports channels.
Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreational purposes. But certain types of votes clearly should be curtailed - 'assault votes,' for example, in which the only purpose of the vote is to harm ot...
When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.
If I could have married my wife and been a sports writer for the past 30 years, I wouldn't be sitting here - but I don't think I'd be sitting someplace where I was sorry to be sitting.
I did all the right things in so many tournaments. But like I said, sometimes in sports it just goes the other way. Maybe you've already won so much that it evens it out a bit sometimes. I don't know.
I don't think that - you know, I'm sure that there's guys that are doing it, because I'm sure in every sport there's players who want to get the edge. But I think that it's been blown overly - way more than guys are using it in our game.
It's very simple. We are asking baseball to come clean and set the record straight. Either baseball officials seriously want to rid their sport of doping, or they want to brush the issue under the carpet. So far, we haven't seen much evidence of the ...
