Quotes by Roger Kahn

“Horse racing is animated roulette.”

“I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.”

“A major league baseball team is a collection of 25 youngish men who have made the major leagues and discovered that in spite of it, life remains distressingly short of ideal.”

“Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlookers responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.”

“Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.”

“Tennis and golf are best played, not watched.”

“The Boys of Summer.”

“I see the boys of summer in their ruin.”

“I covered a team that no longer exists in a demolished ballpark for a newspaper that is dead,”

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You cant ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that its important, that its not typing; its writing.

Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didnt really know or like. Men from ghettos we didnt dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. Theres nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps.

Pique or policy. We would never know.

I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

Football is violence and cold weather and college rye.

Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.

Football is violence and cold weather and sex and college rye.

Tennis and golf are best played, not watched.