Quotes & Sayings About Sports Writing

I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground. — Rodman Philbrick

I am writing in one of the Keepers' Lodges to wh I have returned after stalking & where I am waiting for the Prince of Wales. Quite the best day's sport I have had in this country - 4 good stags & home early! — Winston Churchill

The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.
Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends ... — Hunter S. Thompson

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just the same old game played over and over, and you have to bring out the personalities. You have to drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day, or you're not a good sportswriter. — Rick Bragg

When I was writing the script, I knew didn't want to make a sports movie. I was very clear that I wanted to make a sibling rivalry story. So when I was writing the script, the football was getting in the way of the drama. One day, I saw Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which is probably the most violent film I've ever seen - but the violence is off camera. When I finished watching the film, I said, 'Hey, that's what I have to do.' Haneke gave me this solution. — Carlos Cuaron

It's not nuclear physics. You always remember that. But if you write about sports long enough, you're constantly coming back to the point that something buoys people; something makes you feel better for having been there. Something of value is at work there ... Something is hallowed here. I think that something is excellence. — Tom Callahan

I've had a great career in sports broadcasting - but I'm interested in lots of things. I like to write, I like to produce video projects, and I love to appear on stage. — Ralph Strangis

Writing is like dancing, or sports, where the expression of grace come only through movement. — Steven Taylor Goldsberry

When I'm not writing or working on books as a publisher, I'm doing things that make me happy. One is skiing with my kids and husband. I love sports. — Andrea Davis Pinkney

Although they only give gold medals in the field of athletics, I encourage everyone to look into themselves and find their own personal dream, whatever that may be - sports, medicine, law, business, music, writing, whatever. The same principles apply. Turn your dream into a goal and learn how to attack that goal systematically. Break it into bite-size chunks that seem possible, and then don't give up. Just keep plugging away. — John Naber

I think if you're writing about cricket, you're obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer. — Joseph O'Neill

The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh. — Michael Connelly

I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so - in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day. — Chad Harbach

The work saved me. I clung to it like flotsam in a boiling sea. It was the only solitary sport that I ever played, or was any good at. It felt natural to sit at my computer and type and type some more. For entire minutes, while writing, I could forget the godawful thing that had happened. I could forget that nothing really mattered anymore. Perhaps, if I set my sights low, I could care again about some small thing. I would type a word. One word. Then another. I started to care about the words, then entire sentences ... — Rheta Grimsley Johnson

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks. — Lauren Groff

I'm not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn't good at sports, I wasn't good at anything artsy, ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd. — Mindy Kaling

When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the new Lexus. You have to know what the guy writing the review cares about to understand his take. Does he like sports cars, or does he like Bentleys? — Mike Nichols

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"
(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.) — David Halberstam

The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature, with resistless weapons, and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea. — Samuel Johnson

In my later years I have sought to become simpler, straighter and purer in my handling of the language. I've had many writing heroes, writers who have influenced me. Of the ones still alive, I can think of E.B. White. I certainly admire the pure, crystal stream of his prose. When I was very young as a sportswriter I knowingly and unashamedly imitated others. I had a series of heroes who would delight me for a while and I'd imitate them
Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Joe Williams. — Red Smith

Danilo's was the kind of place where many drinking men come to hide, be it from their wives, in-laws, their jobs or life in general. it was where men and women can come to drink poison as if it was the only form of medicine available to remedy the migraine headache called life. The lighting dim and secluded, mostly covering the tables, counters and the door to the bathroom. The walls were decorated in decades of memories, favorite sports teams and other miscellaneous decor that was typical of small bars such as this one. It was too dark to tell what they were from a distance.
There was a thick layer of smoke hovering in the air around the ceiling lights, the place was smothered in it but was strongest above everyone's heads. The smell was the classic stale bar odor of cigarettes and cheap cigars. — J.C. Joranco

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And
though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall
what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing) — V.S. Naipaul

When I was first writing, I was writing mostly about sporting events, which was really what my assignments were. I was working on the Tour de France bike race and the Barcelona Olympic Games, and those songs tend to be very big, very bombastic-type music, which is the type of music that I love to write. — John Tesh

Anything that you want to write about you can write about in sports. — J. A. Adande

The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway. — Stephen Jay Gould

My dream project is a sports film, because I love writing emotional music and a sports film is one of the few places you can do it without being melodramatic. — Jeff Cardoni

Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice. — Raymond E. Feist

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate. — Jane Leavy

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery. — Will Leitch

Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball. — Pete Hamill

If Shakespeare had been in pro basketball, he never would have had time to write his soliloquies. He would have always been on a plane between Phoenix and Kansas City. — Paul Westhead

When you set a goal, write it down and then it's like making a promise to yourself. — Tony DiCicco

I have spent
or wasted
my life around motor racing: driving, promoting, and writing about what Ernest Hemingway once linked with mountain climbing and bull fighting as the only true sports. The rest, he sniffed, are merely games. — Brock Yates

I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports. — John Edgar Wideman

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it. — Irwin Shaw

I remember growing up, getting the Colorado Springs Sun in the morning and the Denver Post in the afternoon, and my dad just inhaling both of them, and me waiting to get the sports page from him. I fell in love with the craft. I remember being 9 years old and playing baseball in the backyard and coming in and writing little newspaper articles for my dad. — Pat Forde

I don't plan on writing biographies of great sports stars who are still playing ball. But I did write one on Jackie Robinson, who was playing ball in the 20th century. — David A. Adler

That's the thing I love about sports: sports force you to quit. You can't pursue your dream till you're 46. When it comes to acting, writing, comedy, nobody ever stops you. — Adam Carolla

I will always treasure the privilege of writing the 'Sports of The Times' column. — George Vecsey

It's the best thing to happen to a sport, that you have a superstar. In football there is always something to write about the Beckhams, same as people want to write about Rooney or Hooney or whatever his bloody name is. — Bernie Ecclestone

As opposed to a movie [Real Steel] where everything feels fantastical, it was really important to me, and I recognise it's not the first movie with robots in it, but that blend of naturalism in performance, writing and design with the futurism of this sport. That was the idea. — Shawn Anthony Levy

But when I saw the cursive grace of Guido Rahr's fly line writing prayers I couldn't read to the river gods of Outer Mongolia, I knew my name was written there too. Fly fishing was going to be my version of my father's sport, my nod to my Scottish ancestors and to my self, and to the fish crazed part of America I had claimed as my own. — Jessica Maxwell

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud. — Andrew Sullivan

Learning is available at the library for free; under a tree with a dog-eared paperback; at a job with a boss who gives you responsibility and mentorship; while traveling; while leading a cause, movement, or charity; while writing a novel or composing a poem or crafting a song; while interning, apprenticing, or volunteering; while playing a sport or immersing yourself in a language; while starting a business; and now, while watching a TED talk or taking a Khan Academy class ... — Michael Ellsberg

A sports expert is the guy who writes the best alibis for being wrong — Jimmy Cannon

Every time you write anything, at least half your readers are going to disagree with you. A big part of sports writing is how you respond to that tension. — Joe Posnanski

While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area. — Jerry B. Jenkins

By the time I joined the 'Washington Post' sports staff in 1979, Red's Runyonesque notion of sports writing was obsolete. — Jane Leavy

I feel like a lot of people look at pop music with a very formulaic perspective in numbers and patterns, but an outsider would think that the process is very natural. It is, but there are a lot of times where people treat it like a sport - there are tricks you can pull, different combinations that make something better. I don't really think I approach it that way, but I definitely have a love for the science that is pop song writing. — Halsey

But I think a life of raising prize cattle, going shooting two or three times a year, fishing in the summer, and interspersing the whole thing with some golf and bridge - and whenever I felt like talking or writing, doing it with abandon and with no sense of responsibility whatsoever - maybe such a life wouldn't be so bad. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

I might like to be an actor, but there are loads of other things I'm interested in as well, like music and writing and sports. I want to keep my options open. — Daniel Radcliffe

he took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as practised by Clive James, Gore Vidal, and Michael Foot. — Duncan Wu

For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority. — Red Smith

Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That's like a sports thing, it's not usually a comedy and writing thing. — Louis C.K.

Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we're about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what's going on when nobody's looking. — Tom Miller

Kay Cannon was a woman I'd known from the Chicago improv world. A beautiful, strong midwestern gal who had played lots of sports and run track in college, Kay had submitted a good writing sample, but I was more impressed by her athlete's approach to the world. She has a can-do attitude, a willingness to learn through practice, and she was comfortable being coached. Her success at the show is a testament to why all parents should make their daughters pursue team sports instead of pageants. Not that Kay couldn't win a beauty pageant - she could, as long as for the talent competition she could sing a karaoke version of 'Redneck Woman' while shooting a Nerf rifle. — Tina Fey

I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are. — Red Smith

Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed. — Anita Desai

In The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, David Scott addresses the daunting task of establishing a groundwork for the aesthetics of boxing-and succeeds with consummate authority ... In Scott's incisive blend of art history, sociology, and sports writing, he makes a daring and original statement about fighters and the artists who enshrined them. — Robert Anasi

Writing is like a sport. If you don't practice, you don't get any better. — Rick Riordan