Leavy Quotes

#1. On winter Sundays when I was a child, we waited for my father to return from his tennis game with bagels and sturgeon and for my mother to object when the 1 P.M. Giants game began.

Jane Leavy

#2. There are always challenges with books , deciding what to include and what to omit.

Patricia Leavy

#3. Babe Ruth didn't become her father until 18 months after he married her mother, Claire, on April 17, 1929, Opening Day of the baseball season. Julia was 12 years old.

Jane Leavy

#4. Some scholars attribute the decline in nicknaming to the evolutionary process that turned folk heroes into entrepreneurs. The truth is: George Herman Ruth, the namely-est guy ever, exhausted our supply of hyperbole.

Jane Leavy

#5. News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.

Jane Leavy

#6. In the glory days of Orioles, when I was a newbie baseball writer for the Post, the roster of talkers was as good as the everyday lineup. Singy - Ken Singleton - Flanny, and Cakes - the underwear spokesman Jim Palmer - were my go-to guys, occupying stalls along one wall of the shabby chic clubhouse.

Jane Leavy

#7. Students are often taught when to use a particular method and how to use it, but not how to effectively write up their research plan and then later their research results.

Patricia Leavy

#8. There is nothing incompatible about laughter and demons, nor about athletic achievement and depression. Mike Flanagan made me laugh, too. But mostly, he made me brave.

Jane Leavy

#9. Trauma fractures comprehension as a pebble shatters a windshield. The wound at the site of impact spreads across the field of vision, obscuring reality and challenging belief.

Jane Leavy

#10. Cape Cod baseball dates back to the time of the Civil War. A poster at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown touts a round-trip train ride from Hyannis to Sandwich on July 4, 1885 - the occasion of the 14th annual baseball game between Sandwich and Barnstable.

Jane Leavy

#11. Indianapolis proved to be the perfect Super Bowl city, accommodating in the truest sense of the word.

Jane Leavy

#12. For most of my adult life, I dreaded the day I woke up and saw my mother in the mirror. It never happened. But, I had grown into my father. I shouldn't have been surprised. Everyone always said I was the son he never had.

Jane Leavy

#13. Mantle didn't want to stick out, but he did. He didn't wish to be treated as special, but he was. He was uncomfortable being the center of attention, but he was the centerfielder for the most famous franchise in sports.

Jane Leavy

#14. Claire Hodgson, born Clara Mae Merritt, was the daughter of a prominent Georgia attorney who had once represented Ty Cobb. She was still a teenager when she married Frank Hodgson, a gentleman caller nearly twice her age.

Jane Leavy

#15. By the 1880s, baseball was entrenched in the Cape's sandy soil. Semipro teams, commonplace before World War I, were organized into the first Cape Cod League in 1923 - Orleans joined the four original teams five years later. By 1940, the league had foundered on financial shoals and disbanded.

Jane Leavy

#16. There is no free speech in football. Information is parsed by monosyllabic head coaches, who dictate who gets to speak to whom and when.

Jane Leavy

#17. In Naples, Fla., I met a self-made man, a multimillionaire, whose round penthouse apartment is home to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, and Mickey Mantle. He had purchased the most coveted items auctioned by the Mantle family at Madison Square Garden in December 2003.

Jane Leavy

#18. As audiences, when we are exposed to oral history projects not only do we learn but in some ways we also bear witness to that which we have not experienced personally.

Patricia Leavy

#19. Oral history interviews allow us to document and chronicle people's stories; stories that might otherwise not be included in the historical record.

Patricia Leavy

#20. He really loved baseball and loved being on the field. But Mantle was lonely in a lot of ways. He had many great friends, and by all accounts was a good, generous and loyal friend. But there were a lot of people who wanted only a piece of him.

Jane Leavy

#21. Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.

Jane Leavy

#22. Sports journalism is in the midst of an identity crisis so profound that we no longer know whether we're made up of one word or two.

Jane Leavy

#23. I may be biased, but I think the cover art is stunning.

Patricia Leavy

#24. Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

Jane Leavy

#25. In 1927, my father descended the heights and took his place as the newly appointed water boy for his beloved New York football Giants.

Jane Leavy

#26. The modern era of Cape Cod baseball dawned in 1963 when the league became a showcase for the collegiate elite.

Jane Leavy

#27. For Mantle, the Yankees' locker room was a sanctuary, a safe haven where he was understood, accepted and, when necessary, exonerated.

Jane Leavy

#28. Naming is a privilege of reason and the province of bullies. We name to tame and to maim; to honor the great, the dead, and ourselves.

Jane Leavy

#29. By the time I joined the 'Washington Post' sports staff in 1979, Red's Runyonesque notion of sports writing was obsolete.

Jane Leavy

#30. When my father realized he was going blind, he took up golf.

Jane Leavy

#31. People must be able to use their voice, tell their stories, have their experiences recognized and their voices heard.

Patricia Leavy