You can kick a ball into the net, throw a basketball into the net. Tennis is complicated. It'll make a lot of great athletes run the other way because they can't be successful initially.
Nike told me, 'We can't give you royalties because you're not a professional athlete. ' I told them 'I'll go to the Garden and play one-on-no-one. ' I'm a performance athlete!
I would have to say that first preseason game. Just to put the pads on as an NFL player for the first time. It's a humbling experience because you realize that you are here and now you have an opportunity to go to work and continue to better yourself as a player. It's what you work for as an athlete and you know once you get there the real work begins.
The only real stupidity is that of a closed mind.
For younger athletes - women, especially, if it's a male-dominated sport - I'd say be very careful to just be true to yourself. I spent a lot of time trying to emulate how a male wrestler was. They're tough, they're very confident, they don't show a lot of emotion, and they push through everything. That's not me at all. I'm a wrestler but I have emotions, I'm sensitive. When I stopped trying to be something that I wasn't, I felt like I was freeing myself up to find ways to make it work for myself.
Always work hard, never give up, and fight until the end because it's never really over until the whistle blows.
Every GP Masters race will stand out because we will be available for fans, media and sponsors.
There is something that can happen to every athlete and every human being; the instinct to slack off, to give in to pain, to give less than your best; the instinct to hope you can win through luck or through your opponent not doing his best, instead of going to the limit and past your limit where victory is always found. Defeating those negative instincts that are out to defeat us, is the difference between winning and losing - and we all face that battle every day.
Jeremy Lin is the only Asian American in the NBA today and one of the few in any professional U. S. sport. His arrival is surely leading other talented Asian American athletes this week to contemplate a pro career.
We need to educate our elite coaches more and have a better approach to teaching the athletes about how to be healthy rather than berate them, humiliate them, use tactics that could scar them for life.
We typically don't choose our athletes until about a month prior to the Games because anything can happen.
I don't see myself as disabled. There's nothing I can't do that able-bodied athletes can do.
There's far more that goes into being a professional athlete than being a college athlete. So many differences that people don't realize. It's not just about playing football and getting paid to do it. There's a lot of things that you have to deal with.
Reporters often forget that athletes are human beings.
Sports create a bond between comtemporaries that lasts a lifetime. It also gives your life structure, discipline and a genuine, sincere, pure fulfillment that few other areas of endeavor provide.
Get going. Get up and walk if you have to, but finish the damned race.
Religions have found that if you behave in a certain way, if you sort of perform certain rituals that expand your mind and make you realize that will make you realize and help you to seguey into transcendence and perform certain acts, adopt a certain lifestyle, you develop new capacities of mind and heart, just like the dancer, or the athlete that make you into a whole human being and principle after one of these disciplines right across the board in all of the faiths is compassion, the ability to feel with the other person.
The mere athlete becomes too much of a savage.
An athlete must have ability to reach the top, but many who have ability and who do not live clean lives never have and never will be champions for obvious reasons.
The office of president requires the constitution of an athlete, the patience of a mother, the endurance of an early Christian.