Quotes About Tournaments

#1. In the knockout tournaments, it's futile to prepare for a grand finale. You may have worked out many strategies for the final. But you may lose in the first round itself.

Viswanathan Anand

#2. I'm not interested at all in playing more than 12, 15 tournaments a year on an annual basis because like all the old guys out here on this Tour, we've played golf for nearly 30 years of our lives.

Greg Norman

#3. I had a bunch of different colored hats I wore. When I started wearing a pink one, we won five or six tournaments in a row, so I stuck with it. It started as superstition and now it's tradition-my hideous trademark that I always wear.

Karch Kiraly

#4. I started boxing when I was eight. Me and my brother Rafael started boxing in amateur tournaments when I was 13. My father was an ex-pro boxer.

Juan Manuel Marquez

#5. I remember when I first came out on tour, it was Greg Norman and Nick Price. We forget how big Norman was, what a presence he was. I remember one of my first tournaments, Greg threw an orange peel down on the ground and some fan ran over and grabbed it. 'This is Greg Norman's orange peel!'

Phil Mickelson

#6. Well, you know, I've bonded with a lot of people over the years, you know. We played the same tournaments year after year and we go back to the same place and many times the seats have been full and that has meant the world to me for sure.

Andre Agassi

#7. I have many golfer friends whom I play with, including my good friend Ian Poulter, a professional golfer who's coming to Asia to play in a few tournaments.

Heikki Kovalainen

#8. Yes, I have had difficult times on court and at certain tournaments but you need to forget about it and go forward because that's the way it works in our world.

Amelie Mauresmo

#9. I don't consider myself a particularly young chess player. I have been playing in the best tournaments in the world since I was 16 years old. In other sports, if you have been playing for seven years, you are not a young prodigy any more. You're one of the pros.

Magnus Carlsen

#10. I don't play any tournaments to come second best.

Andy Murray

#11. I felt I could play in maybe a dozen tournaments a year as an amateur.

Matt Kuchar

#12. You can win tournaments when you're mechanical, but golf is a game of emotion and adjustment. If you're not aware of what's happening to your mind and your body when you're playing, you'll never be able to be the very best you can be.

Jack Nicklaus

#13. A big part of managing a golf course is managing your swing on the course. A lot of guys can go out and hit a golf ball, but they have no idea how to manage what they do with the ball. I've won as many golf tournaments hitting the ball badly as I have hitting the ball well.

Jack Nicklaus

#14. Tennis can be a grind and there's always the danger of going stale if you think about it too much. You can get embittered if you train too hard and have nothing else on your mind. You have to be able to relax between matches and between tournaments.

Maureen Connolly

#15. My kids have grown up knowing nothing other than me being gone all the time and playing in golf tournaments. That's what they know.

Stewart Cink

#16. We have North Shore, Hawaii and Lost all there, so they have softball tournaments between the casts. It's hilarious.

Josh Holloway

#17. I'm nervous when I play in the Masters or most other tournaments.

Bernhard Langer

#18. When it's game situation, when it's game day, game time, when it's World Cup, when it's these tournaments that happen once every so often, I live for that, I live for that challenge.

Tiffeny Milbrett

#19. I see myself more as an ambassador of the game. And I hope to bring chess to a higher level in the United States. Making bigger tournaments, more interesting events. Making it a respectable profession for young people to be able to pursue in the future.

Maurice Ashley

#20. I'd rather be able to play great tennis at a slam than make eight finals of little tournaments and then lose first round of a slam. That doesn't sound too good.

Sloane Stephens

#21. There was a time when my parents had to sell off a plot of land so that I can buy a rifle for competitive tournaments. After that we stayed in a rented house for the next 15 years.

Gagan Narang

#22. I don't cover golf tournaments anymore - I preside over them.

Dan Jenkins

#23. ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.

Drew Curtis

#24. After being at the top, I don't think I could play senior tournaments, because you know how good you were. I don't know if I would enjoy that, being half of what I was.

Chris Evert

#25. Nowadays tournaments are for nurseries. Look at those kiddies.

Miguel Najdorf

#26. It's not like I'm hanging out at shopping malls or going to celebrity golf tournaments. I'm so in my own little world. I got my dog, my music, my brother, a couple of friends.

Jared Leto

#27. It is never easy to win but it is a lot easier to win when you play well. The key is winning golf tournaments when you are not playing so well. Managing your game is something that I feel that I am still learning to do.

Rory McIlroy

#28. You can win all the tournaments you want, but the majors are what you're remembered for. It's how you're measured as a champion in our sport. The majors are where it's at.

Tiger Woods

#29. I remember winning the first time, you know, suddenly everybody expects, well, okay, now he should win every time he tees it up, win six tournaments.

Retief Goosen

#30. Currently, I bowl regional tournaments out of the PBA Southern Region.

Joe Tex

#31. If you want to become a World Champion you should avoid playing in Open tournaments.

Anatoly Karpov

#32. I feel like when I play, I play tough. That's the New York in me. That's the street tournaments.

Joakim Noah

#33. Being away for the weekends, and me being the international player that I have been for those 30 years, I've spent a lot more time flying around the world, playing different golf tournaments around the world.

Greg Norman

#34. I write in the mornings, two or three hours every day, and then at least four times a week I play in a duplicate game at a bridge club. I try to go to tournaments three, four, or five times a year.

Louis Sachar

#35. Snooker players go into steady decline and lose their intensity after a while. But I will have real purpose the next five years. I want to prove people wrong and win a lot more tournaments.

John Higgins

#36. To play in the men's tournaments I have to keep getting stronger and get more distance.

Michelle Wie

#37. Losses are always a relief. They take a burden off me, make me feel more normal. If I win several tournaments in a row I get so confident I'm in a cloud. If I lose I go back to the dressing room and I'm no better nor worse than anyone else. A loss gets me eager again.

Chris Evert

#38. I wanted to just come out and continue to improve my game, continue to improve my mental capacity to play well in tournaments. I've had a slow year compared to last year, but I've been pleased because I felt like I was getting better.

Webb Simpson

#39. The only way to win tournaments is with the short game. Over half your shots out here are within 30 or 40 yards. Ballstriking is where I'm trying to improve, yes, but more to eliminate big numbers than make birdies.

Phil Mickelson

#40. If long hitting is the thing that causes the spectators to whistle through their teeth in wonderment, why not play tournaments up and down an expansive stadium?

Robert Harris

#41. The kids wait for it to be organized. They want to go play all of these tournaments, for a little practice time. I learned my skills by dropping the puck just with the kids. I think that's missing today.

Bobby Orr

#42. The worst part about the job is the travel, which takes you away from family and friends and important dates and hockey games and tournaments that your kids are in and things like that.

Joe Bowen

#43. Two passed pawns advancing on the enemy pieces have brought me more than a dozen points in tournaments.

David Bronstein

#44. We've made three World T20 finals and won one - that's not by power-hitting. We've beaten the power-hitting sides quite easily and convincingly in all of those tournaments.

Kumar Sangakkara

#45. There's something about being at the tournaments that you don't really get on TV, although golf is a great sport to watch on television.

Bill Paxton

#46. Being able to speak to all my fans is really cool - you always hear people cheering for you on the court, but to have messages of support in between tournaments is really motivating.

Dominika Cibulkova

#47. I like the first-person games, but I like the two-person element in terms of playing basketball games with my friends. That's a good time; we have tournaments and things.

Kevin Weisman

#48. I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

Paul Banks

#49. In the end, it's about the teaching, and what I always loved about coaching was the practices. Not the games, not the tournaments, not the alumni stuff. But teaching the players during practice was what coaching was all about to me.

John Wooden

#50. You don't win tournaments by playing well and thinking poorly.

Lee Westwood

#51. When I first came on tour, I was playing for money. Now I'm playing to win golf tournaments and the money is more than I ever dreamed I could make.

Annika Sorenstam

#52. I definitely have found a balance. I've had so many offers in the past to do different movies or different things and I always choose tournaments over it.

Serena Williams

#53. Everybody knows my life. I won a lot of tournaments and scored more than 1,000 goals, won three World Cups but I could not play in Olympic Games.

Pele

#54. My first season at Liverpool had good moments but also bad ones. We played three tournaments and we played two finals, and that was good.

Luis Suarez

#55. I experienced American golf courses when I was younger and played a lot of USGA and AJGA tournaments.

Inbee Park

#56. I go to the gym every day. That tends to taper off when I'm at a tournament. During tournaments, I'm not trying to build fitness. I'm simply trying to keep away any kind of tension. I go for long walks to clear my head.

Viswanathan Anand

#57. Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls ...

Jim Harrison

#58. I have aspirations to try and compete professionally. Any golfer that competes in tournaments would be lying if they said they didn't.

Lucas Black

#59. My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961. The pay wasn't much, so to get $300 more per year, I agreed to coach the golf team. I didn't even know how to keep score, and really, my main job was not to wreck the van on the way to tournaments.

Lou Holtz

#60. There was a minor burst of macho nuttiness after 'Jaws' came out, in which people would go off in shark tournaments and come back holding the bloody heads of these animals and say, 'Look what I did.' But they've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years anyway.

Peter Benchley

#61. I really stay busy [in retirement]. I often have to cancel my golf games on the weekends to go play in tennis tournaments.

Richard Davies

#62. What I like to do is to try to win as many tournaments and as many majors as I can, and with him [Tiger Woods] in the field, it just gives it more credibility, whatever it is I am able to accomplish.

Phil Mickelson

#63. I've started to show the consistency in majors I had in regular tournaments back in 1998-2000 when I was contending nearly every week.

Lee Westwood

#64. I was always at the gymnasium every day at six o'clock after school. In the mornings I would run, looking forward to future golden gloves and Olympic tournaments.

Muhammad Ali

#65. What had his life meant? All his success, all the tournaments he'd won ... they were like dust and ashes. Meaningless. Without Gisela, his life was meaningless.

Melanie Dickerson

#66. It was a tough year for me, '89, losing two Slam finals and losing another five finals. It wasn't until I won the Masters, or what's now called the ATP Finals, that things changed again. Suddenly I won seven tournaments in 1990 and became No. 1.

Stefan Edberg

#67. I won two ITF tournaments in Japan in two weeks. I had to qualify for both of them, which meant that I won 16 matches in 15 days.

Ana Ivanovic

#68. My dad sacrificed many things in life for me. He abandoned a very promising and lucrative career of an army officer just so that he could continue helping me with my chess and accompanying me to tournaments.

Alexandra Kosteniuk

#69. At the very beginning of my career, when I opened my business in Italy, I was also a ranked tennis player. I had won many tournaments. To be an athlete was my first choice. Second choice: designer. However! There was more money in being a designer at that time.

Oleg Cassini

#70. I don't play the sport for fame. I don't try to win tournaments for fame. I don't do any of that. It's just me. I'm just Bubba. I goof around. I joke around. I just want to be me and play golf.

Bubba Watson

#71. I don't play in tournaments, but I follow some.

Boris Spassky

#72. The most important thing to me is winning tournaments. I love winning.

Tiger Woods

#73. I have formed the Mahendra Singh Dhoni Charitable Trust which organises cricket tournaments in Jharkhand to identify promising cricketers so that we can help groom them, either in India or abroad.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni

#74. I used to play chess when I was a kid and participate in national-level tournaments with the geekiest guys. This one time, I was losing terribly, so I batted my eyelashes and flirted as I asked for a draw. My dad just couldn't believe it. He thought, 'What have I created, a floozy?' But it worked!

Jordana Spiro

#75. One of the thrills of playing at the top tennis centres of the world is to see the Indian flag go up whenever I'm participating in these events. That's enough motivation for any Indian who has the opportunity to perform at these tournaments.

Sania Mirza

#76. I think when you've played at the level that I've played, anything outside the top 10 in certain aspects is just a number, unless you're obviously trying to get into tournaments and stuff.

Michael Chang

#77. I don't follow other players or the tournaments they play. I have my own schedule and do my own thing. I never really think, 'Oh, I want to be or play like so-and-so.' I just like being myself.

Maria Sharapova

#78. What tournaments want to do, typically, is support charities in their community that need the money and charities that are impactful to their community. The better the job the tournament does for the charities, the better they are able to sell the tournament and raise money for the charity.

Tim Finchem

#79. Adelaide could not stop thinking about Blazing Night. How much she loved to play with her. How often her games and tournaments were the most enjoyable of all games in the Land of Games. Did she also like playing? When would they play again?

J.M.K. Walkow

#80. If I win seven tournaments in a row, I get so confident I'm in a cloud. A loss gets me eager again.

Chris Evert

#81. It's quite possible that Beckham suffers from a mental block at big tournaments

Franz Beckenbauer

#82. Now I'm giving up a little in the week-to-week tournaments but reaping the benefits in the majors.

Lee Westwood

#83. The great thing about my two lives is I love them both. I'm very ambitious and nothing gets in the way of me practising and concentrating on winning golf tournaments. But then I come home and get back to normality.

Rory McIlroy

#84. I have to fit holidays around tournaments, particularly the grand slams, in Melbourne, Paris, London and New York.

Roger Federer

#85. I plan my golf outfits for the tournaments, I recycle some for the practice rounds, but I always have new ideas for my golf attire, and I like to dress nice after the rounds, so I have to bring all my heels. It's terrible. The worst part about being on tour is living out of a suitcase.

Paula Creamer

#86. There should be more of an off-season in the game. I think you need to have less tournaments, more of a break at the end of the year so guys can recover.

Pete Sampras

#87. A lot of tournaments that I can remember I made a few bad shots and I was afraid I would lose the tournament and it seemed to work, the putts seemed to go in. Just the Desire.

Arnold Palmer

#88. If I'm being honest, I think I'd be good at television; I just don't know if I am interested, because you are kind of geographically responsible to a location, and frankly I don't know if I retired from tennis so that I could sit around tennis tournaments 12 hours a day.

Andy Roddick

#89. I wish I could have won a lot more tournaments, but I got injured every time I played well.

Marat Safin

#90. There's not many firsts in my career, as I have been a part of many tournaments and fortunate enough to win many.

Maria Sharapova

#91. I remember playing on pretty much an all-minority youth team and going to some of the tournaments north of Cincinnati and not being able to stay with host families where all the other teams were staying with host families.

Barry Larkin

#92. I try to enjoy what I do, and every moment of the life that I have is a blessing. What else can you do but to be happy and try to bring that joy to the other people around - especially in the tournaments. Everybody has bad days. I'm not always funny or laughing.

Novak Djokovic

#93. My mom fed us a million balls. Dad took us to tournaments. Couldn't have done it without them. We had a happy tennis family.

Mike Bryan

#94. There have been so many great tournaments that I've been privileged to see, and people paid me to go watch, that I'm awfully grateful for it.

Dan Jenkins

#95. Global sports tournaments have a range of benefits that go far beyond the games themselves. They can transform the image of a country or a region. They bring people together and reveal new possibilities to a nation's youth.

Richard Attias

#96. Sometimes you lose some tournaments you should win and you win some you should lose.

Charlie Rose

#97. But I have been hitting for a week now and trying to get back into some sort of routine because I need to play well at tournaments,

Kim Clijsters

#98. The key to online play really is multi-table tournaments.

Tim Page

#99. It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.

Simon Kuper

#100. In Georgia it's a little different because of the East Cobb program. It's such a strong program that we see a lot of kids that come through here on a lot of different teams from across the country that come here to play in tournaments.

Roy Clark