Quotes on League

I think, as a rookie, what guys need to be judged on most coming in the league is feel. Not skill, not shooting, not stats, not even passing, but that feel for the game, the ability to read situations and make the right play.

My dreams do not end with playing Major League Baseball.

The reality is he's a specialist because eight years without a piece of silverware ... that is failure.

To pray is to dream in league with God, to envision His holy visions.

All of the teams in this league that have won multiple championships, they didn't come out the gate winning. Sometimes you have to take those hits to understand what it takes to win.

Homophobia hurts our league. Racism hurts it. Sexism hurts it.

Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

There is nothing absurd or impracticable in the idea of a league or alliance between independent nations for certain defined purposes precisely stated in a treaty regulating all the details of time, place, circumstance, and quantity; leaving nothing to future discretion; and depending for its execution on the good faith of the parties.

After I made it to the NBA, I said that I didn't want to be the last player from Africa. After my rookie year, I went to the league and talked about this, and they embraced my idea and started conducting basketball clinics in Africa, and that's when I knew I wouldn't be the last African.

A ball player has to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family has ever made the big leagues.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

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.

God disguised as myriad things, and playing a game of tag has kissed you and said, "You're it. I mean you're really it. Now it does not matter what you believe or feel. For something wonderful, something major-league wonderful, is someday going to happen."

There is no cost difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education; the main difference is curriculum.

By far, the best moment of my big league career was when I caught the last out at the World Series.

On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president.

When we won the league at Tottenham, they came back 2-2 in the last-minute of the game, and they're celebrating - because they're happy to draw against us, obviously. And I remember saying to Mauricio Tarricco, do you realise we only need a point to be Champions? And they all [were really shocked]. So I said 'Yes. Now we're going to celebrate on your pitch. Bye bye!'

Winning one league title at Roma, to me, is worth winning 10 at Juventus or Real Madrid.

Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.

Everything has been such a whirlwind ever since I stepped foot in the league and everything has been like a dream, so I'm just blessed to be in this position.