Player quotes
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"Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret."
"John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad."
"My dream as a child was to play with a bass player like Ray Brown, who played with the Oscar Peterson Trio. The feeling I had listening to his work was almost carnal, so to actually play for him was earth-shattering for me."
"I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn't good enough. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid."
"And your brain doesn't naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. "for example," people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that's a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies."
"I had sort of exhausted all the avenues playing in Detroit. So again, through the stewardship of my brother, I ended up in California and went to the Musicians Institute in L.A. I wanted to get better as a player."
"He's helped me do so much in my career, helped me be the player that I am. If there's no Larry Brown, then there's no MVP, Allen Iverson."
"I don't think players care too much about stats and statistics."
"Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler and I used to argue for hours about who the best athletes are. I thought football players were better overall."
"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you-trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness."
"The big thing is that we have five percent or less of the hardcore players actively entertaining the other ninety-five percent."
"Players like to know that they've discovered things that even the designers didn't know were in the game."
"I'm an unbelievable designer. I don't know how I know and just do these things. I just start sketching and then I just know the colors and I always know the forecast. I know green and purple are going to be hot. I was born to be a designer. I worked hard to be a tennis player, I don't work hard to be a designer."
"If I had spent a quarter of the time that I spent manipulating my sexuality in front of a piano instead, I would be the most gifted piano player of my lifetime."
"If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds."
"I used to play my records aloud until one night my mother was like, "This is too loud. I'm not having it," and so I put on headphones. But the headphones didn't stretch all the way to my bed from the record player, so I had to sleep on the floor in order to hear the records. I slept on the floor right next to the record player until I was probably 19 years old."
"Do you know the nicest thing about looking at pictures of a 1950's baseball park? The only people wearing baseball caps are the players."
"Badfinger was pretty good. It was a very sad story, though, because the guy, he ended up killing himself, Pete Ham, who was a lovely fellow, he was a good guitar player and a great singer, he wrote, the most famous tune I would imagine is "Without You", you know the Harry Nilsson record."
"I knew where I wanted to go, what kind of player I wanted to become and I focused on getting there."
"At the moment we've only got 16 first-team players and my initials stand for Mick McCarthy, not Merlin the Magician (the new Wolves manager gets the excuses in early!)"
