sports

The sad fact of life: Winners love the game. Losers don't.

In Texas, two things are cherished above all else- football and gossip.

Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period.

On the surface, there is something peculiar about turning a portion of one's happiness over to a collection of ballplayers, and perhaps more peculiar still is concerning oneself about ball games played decades before one's birth.

I've been let in on a dirty little secret: winning changes nothing. Now that I've won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad. Not even close.

One group of riders doped, the others alongside them racing clean. You can work out for yourselves which group was fastest.

One hit, one moan of fractured air, one solid impact and the man went down.

Baseball, of all sports, and maybe of all human endeavors, has no room for cynicism.

A friend tells a story about taking his ten-year-old son to a Jets game. The game was being played during a driving rain on a freezing cold day, and the Jets lost by twenty points to a team they were supposed to beat. As they headed toward the exits, the boy looked up, with tears in his eyes, and asked, 'Dad, why are we Jets fans?

If you make lots of little changes to your lifestyle, you__l need to make time to have some fun too, otherwise life can get a little boring.

With sports, you have no time to reflect. You just do.

One of the supreme paradoxes of baseball, and all sports, is that the harder you try to throw a pitch or hit a ball or accomplish something, the smaller your chances are for success. You get the best results not when you apply superhuman effort but when you let the game flow organically and allow yourself to be fully present. You'll often hear scouts say of a great prospect, "The game comes slow to him." It mean the prospect is skilled and poised enough to let the game unfold in its own time, paying no attention to the angst or urgency or doubt, funnelling all awareness to the athletic task at hand.

We spend 8 hours a day, for 10 months a year, for nearly 17 years sending our kids to school to prepare them for life. In all of that time there is never a course in overcoming adversity, goal setting, sacrifice, perseverance, teammates, or family. I guess that's what wrestling is for.

Nobody will outwork, out-train or out-will me !

I had grown used to getting a pat on the back and being told after a good result: 'Well done, David - you should be happy, you're the first clean rider.

The more you practice the better you'll be, the harder you train the great in you they'll see.

Is it or is it not a matter of importance that a young man starts out in life with an ability to shut his jaw hard and say "I will," or "I will not," and mean it?

Thankfully, Coach had taught me a way of embracing the pain. He called that overwhelming rust of hurt 'The Moment of No Return', a point of pure agony when the body told an athlete to quit, to rest, because the pain was so damn tough. It was a tipping point. He reckoned that if an athlete dropped in The Moment, then all the pain that went before it was pointless, the muscles wouldn't increase their current strength. But if he could work through the pinch and run another two reps, maybe 3, them the body would physically improve in that time, and that was when an athlete grew stronger.