Quotes About Professional Sports

#1. Professional sports, in of itself, is a fantasy, for the majority of the population.

Gabriel Luna

#2. Professional sports is a business.

Lynn Swann

#3. One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people's attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.

Noam Chomsky

#4. There is certainly an underrepresentation of Asian Pacific Islanders in professional sports/athletics.

Nathan Adrian

#5. If you're going to die at age thirty-five, professional sports is the best life ever. If you're going to die at eighty-five, it's the worst. The best life ever lived by anyone in any walk of life was Lou Gehrig.

Douglas Brunt

#6. To convert college sports into professional sports would be tantamount to converting it into minor league sports. And we know that in the U.S., minor league sports aren't very successful either for fan support or for the fan experience.

Mark Emmert

#7. It's funny, you can get over the win pretty quick and get ready for the next opponent. When you lose, it just eats at you ... What could we have done? What should I have done? All those things. Just part of playing professional sports and sports in general.

Tony Romo

#8. That's the one regret I have in all the years that I've played professional sports, that I didn't win a championship in the N.F.L. And that's why you play on any level of team sports: you want to win a championship as part of a team.

Warren Moon

#9. One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.

Jacob M. Appel

#10. Professional sports are something they can't control.

Troy Vincent

#11. We all have to draw some lines. To preserve my sanity, I steer clear of cooking, professional sports and most imports, unless imported to us via PBS, Sundance, etc.

Hank Stuever

#12. In all American professional sports you start on a certain level and you have to work your way up through a farm system. It's really the same in acting.

Bruce Dern

#13. I'm getting more and more bored with professional sports, but I still watch.

Michael Keaton

#14. When the Pentagon feels free and even gleeful about killing anybody and Everybody who gets in the way of their vicious crusade for oil, the public soul of this country has changed forever, and professional sports is only a serenade for the death of the American dream. Mahalo.

Hunter S. Thompson

#15. I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.

Red Smith

#16. There's not a long track record of people leaving professional sports to become a software developer.

Curt Schilling

#17. I work under three umbrellas: entertainment, education, and entrepreneurship. Of course the entertainment fragment speaks for itself because I'm in Chicago. However, a lot of folks may not know I teach courses at Ohio State University that covers life in professional sports.

Eddie George

#18. Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

Neal Stephenson

#19. Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That

Steven Johnson

#20. I was a judo athlete, while taking modeling as my side job, before I eventually quit my professional sports career over a knee injury.

Joe Taslim

#21. I want to successfully make the transition from a life in professional sports to another life, without running into major upheavals.

Oliver Kahn

#22. The greatest owner in professional sports history is Eddie DeBartolo.

Ronnie Lott

#23. Drugs are very much a part of professional sports today, but when you think about it, golf is the only sport where the players aren't penalized for being on grass.

Bob Hope

#24. A lot of players go into a restaurant and ask for a special table. I go and stand in line with the working people. It's very easy to get spoiled playing professional sports.

Johnny Damon

#25. But Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our "rest time.

Walter Brueggemann

#26. I will openly admit that I've never really followed hockey. Given my New England upbringing, I have always adhered to the Celtics, Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins mantra of professional sports fandom, but hockey was definitely the lowest sport on the totem pole - even when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup.

Rachel Nichols

#27. Playing professional sports, it's important to eat healthy and take care of your body. In the offseason, rest is really important to me.

Troy Polamalu

#28. In the 1970s, professional sports found a different breed of team owner in George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees.

Don Yaeger

#29. David Stern might be the smartest executive in the history of professional sports. His obsession with the Vagrant Kings is one of the strangest stories.

R.E. Graswich

#30. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud.

Michael Crichton

#31. I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it's fundamentally a form of entertainment.

Gregg Easterbrook

#32. It's not just the NFL. Every other league has a draft. It has been fundamental to the success of professional sports.

Roger Goodell

#33. In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure.

John Scalzi

#34. I'm thrilled, I'm grateful, I'm blessed. I played for the world's greatest professional sports team in history. Once a Dallas Cowboy, always a Dallas Cowboy.

Bob Hayes

#35. I've had the good fortune to have a much more diverse life than most people would, professional sports and television and news and movies.

Ted Turner

#36. Obviously the current approach on steroids both in professional sports and amateur sports is not working.

Armand Hammer

#37. The two major things that changed the makeup of all professional sports are money generated by television and courts that players went to in order to win their freedom as free agents.

Will McDonough

#38. Loyalties of professional sports teams mystified him; they were rotating groups of paid professionals, usually with no ties other than their employment contract to the local area. One might as well feel loyalty to and cheer on the construction crew repairing the state highway nearest one's town

Joel L.A. Peterson

#39. I had grand visions of being in professional sports. But when reality set in, I went, 'Oh, OK. I'll just move to Hollywood and be an actor.' I didn't want to look back on my life and wonder, 'What if I had done this? Or I had done that?'

Bailey Chase

#40. We've seen the kind of social impact a professional sports team has on a city. A team brings high-profile role models into your community who are healthy and they're great images for the city to gravitate toward, especially for kids.

Mick Cornett

#41. Everybody wants to play his natural position and play every day, but in the world of professional sports that's not always possible.

Brian Roberts

#42. My grandmother is a huge Hawkeyes fan, so I, by proxy, have to be one. I'm more of a professional sports fan, and I've never been a huge college fan, but because of my grandmother, I've gotten into a lot of really good Hawkeye games. So, because I'm a good grandson, I'm a Hawkeye fan.

Corey Taylor

#43. There isn't a single professional sports season now that doesn't go on at least a month too long. Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both.

James Reston Jr.

#44. Today, we are the only people who are more likely to own a professional sports team than to play for one.

Celso Cukierkorn

#45. I strongly believe the black culture spends too much time, energy and effort raising, praising, and teasing our black children about the dubious glories of professional sports.

Arthur Ashe

#46. Which I think is great. I don't think there's nothing wrong with it. If you look in most professional sports, they're run by Jewish people. If you look at a lot of most successful corporations and stuff, more businesses, they're run by Jewish. It's not a knock, but they are some crafty people.

Michael Ray

#47. Really, if you get in the ring and box with someone for real, I don't think it is a sport. As far as professional fighters, you are literally putting your life on the line.

Ving Rhames

#48. I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.

Roger Kahn

#49. He has the body of a professional athlete, chiseled to perfection in all the right places.

Collette West

#50. Unfortunately the world is what it is now. People don't get along for whatever reason. As professional athletes, in a way we're almost ambassadors for peace, because sports brings everyone together.

Venus Williams

#51. People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don't like change. A bunch of people don't like the Olympics now because we've added skateboarding ... We're modernizing the sport.

Larry Ellison

#52. I'd had 35 professional fights and mentally I was tired of it. I'd sort ot fallen out of love with the sport.

Barry McGuigan

#53. More than any other major sport, professional or amateur, college football games are decided by the physical incompetence and downright chokery of their players.

Stephen Rodrick

#54. Professional tennis has become an extremely physical and unbelievably competitive sport. Injuries are the bane of tennis players, and it goes with the territory.

Sania Mirza

#55. Golf is the only sport that a professional can enjoy playing with his friends.

Chi Chi Rodriguez

#56. It is just a crazy life as a sportsman. My daughter, Sam, wants to go into tennis, and I tell her, 'No, you don't want to go into professional sport.'

Ernie Els

#57. I'm always positive when it comes to professional bodybuilding, hell I'm Mr. Olympia for God's sake. If I'm number one in our sport and I have a negative attitude then our sport don't need me and I don't need our sport. There are problems and controversy in all sports. That's really unavoidable.

Ronnie Coleman

#58. I played professional level sports. When you're playing for money, it's a whole other level.

Kurt Russell

#59. It's been one of those things where anybody that's played a sport at the professional level, there's always a lot of challenges. And the one thing that's always been a constant for me is Jesus Christ and my faith - and just knowing that my walk with Christ is steadily going up.

Tim Hudson

#60. [On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"
(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)

David Halberstam

#61. There's just so much negative media surrounding professional athletes or sports in general, whether it's kids that are pressured too much or professional athletes making mistakes that influence their family.

Kristopher Belman

#62. Professional Gaming, or e-Sports as it's now called, is a multi-million dollar industry in Korea. You can even get a bachelor's degree in e-Sports.

Anonymous

#63. When I got injured, I think I was starting to sense that there was more to the world than just sports. This dream of playing professional soccer probably wasn't the best track for me.

Eric Swalwell

#64. Surely, sport is not fundamentally about the safety of athletes. If it were, we'd probably have to ban professional football, right after boxing.

Alice Dreger

#65. Several professional athletes have wrongly taught many young Americans by example that the only way to succeed in sports is to take steroids.

Jim Sensenbrenner

#66. There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'

David Halberstam

#67. It is surprising how many professional athletes, along with their families and friends, are gaga over movie and music stars, and the reverse is true with entertainers and sports stars.

Cheech Marin

#68. I always seem to get parts where I play the sports professional - and that's not me at all!

Jay Ryan

#69. It is cycling as a professional sport that represents the problem. It can transform someone into a liar.

Greg LeMond

#70. If you're looking to be a professional athlete on the top tier of any sport, my best advice is to put everything you have into it. If you're not, somebody else is. It's got to be all or nothing.

Dominick Cruz

#71. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength: a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.

Eduardo Galeano

#72. To me, first and foremost, basketball is a fun sport. It is a hobby, an interest. And second, it is a profession. I feel that I am very fortunate that I can find a professional job that I really, really love.

Yao Ming

#73. My good health, coupled with joy of tobogganing and my desire to be the best, has helped me stay in professional sport for so long.

Armin Zoggeler

#74. The integration of a headgear in professional boxing would do so much to make it safer for young men. They could go into the sport, make a lot of money and then come out and be good grandfathers.

George Foreman

#75. At ten I was playing against 18-year-old guys. At 15 I was playing professional ball with the Birmingham Black Barons, so I really came very quickly in all sports.

Willie Mays

#76. I did always dream of being a professional player. I think every kid does dream of being a pro, but to last the journey you have to love tennis as a sport and if you are lucky enough to make it in the pros, it is really a bonus.

Samantha Stosur

#77. He was a professional athlete and coach, a Ferrari who lived his life in the fast lane. She was a girl-next-door kind of girl, closer to a golf cart than a sports car.

Emily March

#78. Looking good is important. We're our own premium brand as professional athletes, so you want to be thoughtful about presentation and represent yourself and your city and sport as best you can.

C. J. Wilson

#79. I think sports for kids is the greatest thing in the world because it teaches you how to share, about winning and losing and pressure. But I don't think you should force your kid to become a professional athlete.

Wayne Gretzky

#80. You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that's designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I race to win.

Ayrton Senna

#81. The only thing wrong with the NBA - or any other professional sport, for that matter - is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.

Hunter S. Thompson

#82. Professional golf is the only sport where, if you win 20% of the time, you're the best.

Jack Nicklaus

#83. I knew I was never going to play professional sport, but I loved playing and I went to all the games I could afford to.

Spike Lee

#84. Playing sports is a good thing for ordinary people; sport played at the professional level is not good for your health. It pushes your body to limits that human beings are not naturally equipped to handle. ==========

Anonymous

#85. I had pro offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, who were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.

Gerald R. Ford

#86. I was a total athlete. I loved sports, but when I realized I wasn't going to be a professional athlete, I realized I wanted to be in movies.

Seann William Scott

#87. Jeremy Lin is the only Asian American in the NBA today and one of the few in any professional U.S. sport. His arrival is surely leading other talented Asian American athletes this week to contemplate a pro career.

Eric Liu

#88. I have zero interest in sports of any kind - professional, college or international.

Jimmy Wales

#89. In my experience, it's only people who don't play sport at a professional level who think that there is anything remotely erotic about a locker room.

John Amaechi

#90. I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

Timothy Ferriss

#91. Even though I play a professional sport now, I love college baseball.

Roger Clemens