The pitcher has got only a ball. I've got a bat. So the percentage in weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.
Hank AaronRead
It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.
Interpretation
Success in sports requires perseverance and skill, but sometimes it comes unexpectedly in other areas of life.
Hank Aaron's quote highlights the dedication and effort needed in achieving a remarkable milestone in baseball, represented by the seventeen years he invested to secure three thousand hits. It also reveals the irony that he could achieve a significant accomplishment in a completely different sport, golf, in just one afternoon, suggesting that success can arrive in unexpected ways and that talent may manifest in varied forms.
In practice
During a motivational speech about persistence in sports.
The pitcher has got only a ball. I've got a bat. So the percentage in weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.
I don't feel right unless I have a sport to play or at least a way to work up a sweat.
In playing ball, and in life, a person occasionally gets the opportunity to do something great. When that time comes, only two things matter: being prepared to seize the moment and having the courage to take your best swing.
In baseball, there is something electrifying about the big leagues. I had read so much about Stan Musial, Ted Williams and Jackie Robinson. I had put those guys on a pedestal. They were something special. I really thought they put their pants on different, rather than one leg at a time.
Making the majors is not as hard as staying there, staying interested day after day. It's like being married. The hardest part is to stay married.
I'm hoping someday that some kid, black or white, will hit more home runs than myself. Whoever it is, I'd be pulling for him.
Living as we do in an age of noise and bluster, success is now measured accordingly. We must all be seen, and heard, and on the air.
Once you turn pro and you're making the big money and kids are buying your sneakers and your skates and your gloves and so on, you are a member of that role model club.
Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
If there was no Bill Bowerman, there would have been no me. He had about as much of an impact on my life as any one person could have. He taught me about competition and ingrained it in me. He taught me not to praise ordinary performances.
There is no royal road to a successful life, as there is no royal road to learning. It has got to be hard knocks, morning, noon, and night, and fixity of purpose.
I found the most difficult thing when you became successful - when I had the record album, it won Album of the Year - that you were cut off from the source of your material. Your material was everyday people, and you were kind of cut off from that, and you had to work at it.
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