Great Sporting Wisdom: Legendary Quotes from the World of Sport
John Scally
One of the most endearing features of sport is its perennial humour. Witness this extraordinary collection of Freudian slips, true confessions, double entendres and unintentional puns which demonstrates that sporting foot-in-mouth disease is far more rampant than mad cow disease.Players, coaches, commentators and journalists are all represented as well as some famous names who know little about sport but are always good for a quote."I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer but I had some problems with buoyancy."WOODY ALLEN"The first ninety minutes are the most important."BOBBY ROBSON"I was swinging like a toilet door on a prawn trawler."DAVID FEHERTYThe British boys are adopting the attacking position with Cox up."DAN MASKELL
Copyright (#ulink_a3d6764e-08bf-58f6-a0a3-d1ec60553b1b)
Harper Non-Fiction
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in 1996 by CollinsWillow
Copyright © John Scally 1996
John Scally accepts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780002187336
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193263
Version: 2016-06-20
Dedication (#ulink_2489ad11-975b-5ced-b8b5-de0885b0d965)
To Sheila, Aine, James,
Liam and Fiona Finneran
Contents
Cover (#u18992ed8-32b5-5506-aed5-df532a9eedb8)
Title Page (#ue3d9d3c0-b0fb-5aed-b764-065ab7142e0b)
Copyright (#ulink_e8bc6311-29f7-58ad-b14c-575012df1f95)
Dedication (#ulink_23ca79f0-8e32-54ae-bd4c-1ec67849ff3d)
Introduction (#ulink_20db6830-9f09-521b-aea2-be2537c00a45)
The Good, The Glad and The Wordy (#ulink_e93b3b89-2457-5e8f-8e5a-7ad8c028c7e9)
Chapter One: Athletic Aberrations (#ulink_abddfeb3-d7f9-533a-907d-fa7d03cdfcfa)
Chapter Two: Baseball Bloomers (#ulink_cd556eff-02ec-557c-a505-c7e08eaeab7d)
Chapter Three: Basketball Babel
Chapter Four: Board and Card Games
Chapter Five: Boxing Barbs
Chapter Six: Pedal to the Metal
Chapter Seven: Cricket Classics
Chapter Eight: Football’s Fun and Frolics
Chapter Nine: Golfing Gems
Chapter Ten: Horse Racing Hoots
Chapter Eleven: Ruck and Roll
Chapter Twelve: Snooker from the Lip
Chapter Thirteen: Tennis Theatricals
Chapter Fourteen: Sporting Miscellany
Great Sporting Supermouths of our Time
Chapter Fifteen: Walker the Talker
Chapter Sixteen: The Lowe-Down
Chapter Seventeen: On the Great Vine
Chapter Eighteen: The Golden Foot in Mouth Award
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher (#ulink_ebcb23b4-c5c1-566e-a03d-8a1286720aa0)
Introduction (#ulink_ed47aa25-7cad-5131-9289-8cac2de5b793)
In 1906 Ambrose Bierce defined quotation as ‘the act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.’ Down through history much has been said and written about the people and events that have shaped the sporting world. This book assembles some of the most commonly misquoted and misattributed of those sporting quotations.
Humour is a difficult thing to define. What reduces one person to helpless laughter may leave another indifferent. And what makes a funny quote? The context can be crucial.
In normal circumstances the following would not be of great interest: ‘Sharp are currently working on bringing 3D TV into your living-rooms. Mr Koshima hopes it will be so realistic that viewers will have to duck when Eric Cantona takes a shot.’
However, what makes this press release from Manchester United’s sponsors such a gem is that it was issued just before Cantona’s flying kick at a Crystal Palace fan. Of course, Cantona has carved a special niche for himself in this field with the immortal ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.’ No doubt this remark will be the subject of PhD theses in years to come in such disparate disciplines as philosophy, Anglo-French literature and sporting psychology.
The quote ‘Because we are dressed in black and white, the red, yellow, green, brown, blue and pink of the balls appeal to us’ may not seem very noteworthy. It becomes interesting when the source is revealed as Mother John Baptist of the Benedictine Order of the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, who pray for the one hundred martyrs of the Reformation, during a snooker competition among the sisters to raise funds for their London convent.
Innuendo is another favoured verbal weapon in sporting quotes. An example is a remark, often attributed to Jilly Cooper, about a different form of sailing game: ‘I never liked sailing men. They yell blue murder at you all day, but then, when the boat is moored, the whisky comes out, “Captain Bligh” turns into Casanova and is all ready to play deck coitus.’
In 1890 Samuel Butler observed: ‘It is bad enough to see one’s own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people’s rubbish fathered upon oneself.’ Received wisdom is often incorrect. Cary Grant boasted: ‘I improve on misquotation.’ This book may also serve as an arbitration facility for long-standing disputes about who said what. The target audience is any reader with a sense of humour, or an eye for the eccentric or simply ridiculous, but obviously this will mean more to the sports enthusiast. One preliminary warning – the truth is often funnier than fiction.
John Scally
Rathmines, Dublin
PART ONE (#ulink_41d31e21-e6c6-507b-b9f3-b1a3902b6fbd)
THE GOOD, THE GLAD AND THE WORDY (#ulink_41d31e21-e6c6-507b-b9f3-b1a3902b6fbd)
1 (#ulink_04cd6e23-c4de-5c21-aa21-93ce7123b21c)
Athletic Aberrations (#ulink_04cd6e23-c4de-5c21-aa21-93ce7123b21c)
Robert Burns once stated: ‘I like to have quotations ready for every occasion … they save one the trouble of finding expression adequate to one’s feelings.’ At its best, athletics has the power to make the pulse miss a beat. Whatever your sporting fancy, this collection of quotations recreates the unique excitement, drama and unpredictability of athletics in the words of the sport’s practitioners. Anyone who’s anyone in the athletics game may find themselves quoted here in their scurrilous, unguarded, rude and humorous moments. A newspaper is rather caustically defined by George Bernard Shaw as a device ‘unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.’ Hence it is no surprise that the media presence in this section is very strong.
1. On the track
Misplaced Confidence
The difference between me and other athletes who go to the Olympics is that I go to win and they go to compete.
David Bedford, long-distance runner, before the Munich Olympics. He only came sixth!
Heavy Breather
The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
Erma Bombeck
Fall Of The Titans
The most famous collision since the Titanic and the iceberg.
Pat Butcher on Zola Budd’s tripping of Mary Decker in the 1984 Olympics
Amongst Women
My secrets? I don’t know – maybe ladies?
Mexican marathon man Dionicio Ceron on the key to his success
Health-Conscious
Go jogging? What, and get hit by a meteor?
Robert Benchley
The Power Of Love
I never jog. Love is still a better and more pleasurable sport.
Cary Grant
Race
We should be thankful to lynch mobs. I’ve got a brother who can run a half-mile faster than any white boy in the world.
Dick Gregory
Handicap
My leotard got twisted and stuck right up my bottom just as I was getting to the hurdle. It was a bit of an unwanted distraction, really.
Sally Gunnell, unhappy at encountering unexpected problems in her 1993 World Championship semi-final
You Don’t Say
Early rounds of an athletics meeting are called heats, because that is when the competition begins to heat up.
Colin M. Jarman
A Racing Certainty
The race is not always to the swift, but that is where to look.
Hugh E. Keough
Close Shave
Italian men and Russian women don’t shave before a race.
Eddy Ottoz
Bias
The decathlon is nine Mickey Mouse events and the 1500 metres.
Steve Ovett
Incentive
I’m Jewish. I don’t work out. If God wanted us to bend over he’d put diamonds on the floor.
Joan Rivers
Missing The Target
The athletic facilities situation is a mess. Girls still haven’t figured out how to use the urinals.
John Roberts
Elementary, My Dear Watson
In running, you have to be suspicious when you line up against girls with moustaches.
Maree Holland
Medical Advice
My doctor told me my jogging could add years to my life. I told him ‘Yeah, since I began, I already feel ten years older!’
Lee Trevino
Early Risers
Jogging is for people who aren’t intelligent enough to watch Breakfast TV.
Victoria Wood
Testing Positive
If she [Diane Modahl] was as much over the limit as the test supposes, she would be a big girl with a deep voice and beard. We’d all be calling her Barry White.
Tony Jarrett
High Power
Nature’s attempt [Vladimir Kuts - Olympic 5000 & 10000m champion] at an engine in boots.
A. P. Herbert
Wired For Speed
I’m studying to be an electronics engineer. I put wires in my legs.
Wilson Kipketer after winning the 800m gold at the 1995 World Championships
Mathematics Made Complicated
I’ve got ten pairs of training shoes. One for every day of the week.
Samantha Fox, ex-Page Three Girl
Requirements
Women need a firm bra, not one of the flimsy all-elastic ones. That’s especially true if you have large breasts. Otherwise they’ll bounce and you’ll always be waiting for them to come down before you take your step.
Nine Kuscsik
2. Field Of Dreams
Expensive Education
Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
Minna Antrim
Muscle
People think of me as the Incredible Hulk.
Fatima Whitbread
The Hands That Rock The Cradle
To be an Olympic champion, I am convinced you must choose your parents carefully.
Per-Olaf Astrand, Swedish athletic researcher
Idiotic
Athletic sports, save in the case of young boys, are designed for idiots.
George Nathan
Amateur Ethos
A proper definition of an amateur sportsman today is one who accepts cash, not cheques.
Jack Kelly
High Profile
Our athletes are flying the flagship for British sport.
Fatima Whitbread
Elegance
Watching the Russian female shot-putters is like watching an eighteen-stone ballet dancer.
David Campbell
Hidden Talents
Somewhere inside that flabby body [Geoff Capes’] was an athlete trying to get out.
Stuart Storey
High Flyers
If you want a track team to win the high jump, you find one person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can each jump one foot.
Frederick E. Terman
Vogue
The only time our girls looked good in Munich was in the discotheque, between 9 and 11 every night.
US Olympic coach
Realism
I know I’m no Kim Basinger – but she can’t throw the javelin.
Fatima Whitbread
Birth Control
The [Olympic] Games need to take the Pill before the sporting explosion gets entirely out of hand.
Peter Wilson
3. Soundbytes
Job Opportunities
If you’re a sporting star, you’re a sporting star. If you don’t quite make it, you become a coach. If you can’t coach, you become a journalist. If you can’t spell, you introduce Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon.
Desmond Lynam
Darwin Revisited
Tonight, a special Horizon programme, Survival of the Fartest … Fastest.
Richard Baker from the BBC cassette Sporting Gaffes
Sequence Of Events
That performance would have won him the Olympic gold medal in the championship four years ago, which he won anyway.
Desmond Lynam, talking about Sebastian Coe
Get To The Bottom Of It
Harvey Glance, the black American sprinter, with the white top and black bottom.
Ron Pickering
A Change Of Plan
When the pace is slow, sometimes the athletes will make a move they hadn’t planned to make earlier in the race than they planned to do it.
Brendan Foster
Insight
Watch the time – it gives you a good indication of how fast they are running.
Ron Pickering
Carried Away
Anything that matters so much to David Coleman, you realise, doesn’t matter so much at all.
Clive James
Des -ire
Desmond Lynam is so laid back, he’s almost horizontal – which is exactly how his legions of fantasising housewifely fans imagine him to be.
Frank Keating
The Invisible Woman
Zola Budd, so small, so waif-like, you literally cannot see her; but there she is.
Alan Parry
Trivia
The world’s fastest woman is an expert cook.
Daily Graphic headline after Fanny Blankers-Koen won Olympic gold in 1948
Power To All Our Friends
The man [Henry Rono] with asbestos lungs.
Ron Pickering
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