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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

George Vecsey Quotes

The football playoffs feature one-off affairs, without bad feelings building from weekend to weekend. In addition, football uses platoons for offense and defense and kicking, so only the interior linemen have a chance to really get up close and personal with one another.

– George Vecsey

There is nothing wrong with athletes coming back from retirement.

– George Vecsey

Most descriptions make Beijing sound overbuilt: not a blade of grass left.

– George Vecsey

Personal honors never meant much to Bill Russell, one of America’s most successful athletes with 2 college titles, 1 Olympic gold medal and 11 – count ’em, 11 – N.B.A. championships with the Boston Celtics.

– George Vecsey

We all know the Red Sox did not win a World Series for 86 years after unloading Ruth, and the Cubs just might be carrying some heavy weight for past karmic transgressions.

– George Vecsey

I love Major League Soccer, covered the first game in 1996 in a funky stadium in San Jose, and I applaud just about every move that its commissioners, Garber and Doug Logan, have made.

– George Vecsey

To this day, while maintaining a healthy respect for the Giants and Jets and other teams I cover, I admit to checking the results every Monday to see how the Bears did.

– George Vecsey

Tom Seaver was let loose twice by the Mets and pitched a no-hitter for the Reds and won his 300th game for the White Sox, but he wears a Mets cap in the Hall of Fame as homage to the 1969 championship.

– George Vecsey

Night tennis began at the United States Open in 1975 with certain stars trying to beg out and certain patrons trying to dump unwanted tickets on scalpers.

– George Vecsey

For good reasons, there are no ties during the Stanley Cup season. Somebody needs to win so the lads can get out to their cottages on the lakes, where all hockey players spend their summers, or so I have been told.

– George Vecsey

Why is the N.F.L. so popular? The N.F.L. grew in the comfort zone after World War II. People had money and time. A popular American sport got bigger.

– George Vecsey

I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen rain. I’ve also had to scramble over tundra to get to the Super Bowl and seen baseball turf fields that could fry a fielder’s soles.

– George Vecsey

This occasional sports columnist, who has been to his share of Super Bowls, had been glad to be home on Super Bowl Sunday, but the scary commercials made me want to be in the melee of the arena, where you are not aware of commercials.

– George Vecsey

We all understand the economics of the Super Bowl – 10 or 12 minutes of the ball in motion will be stretched into three and a half hours or more of money-making commercials.

– George Vecsey

When I was working on the unauthorized biography ‘Stan Musial: An American Life,’ which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

– George Vecsey

I know, I know – men have that extra hero gene in their foolish makeup; it’s part of our charm. But I happen to know some women who have their inner sports hero, too.

– George Vecsey

When the Mets were on their run in the 1980s, Gary Carter was often seen hugging somebody. It was easy to joke about that. The best hug of all was with Jesse Orosco at the end of the 1986 World Series.

– George Vecsey

Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.

– George Vecsey

I proposed abolishing boxing because it was bad for the brain, but boxers were generally so decent that I loved being around the gyms.

– George Vecsey

Title IX, whether voluntarily or via court cases, opened gymnasiums to women, produced uniforms and schedules and buses.

– George Vecsey

When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback – probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.

– George Vecsey

Flo Hyman became America’s best-known volleyball player with a faulty aorta, but she did not know it.

– George Vecsey

Some of us love hockey not just for its ferocity and skill but for its underlying code of civility off the ice.

– George Vecsey

Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people’s favorite team.

– George Vecsey

In New York, I run into Packers fans who have never lived in Wisconsin, Canadiens fans who have never lived in La Belle Province, Celtics fans who admire Russell and Bird and Pierce but have no trace of a Boston accent.

– George Vecsey

Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral – but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.

– George Vecsey

Under a pulsating full moon, the gussied-up Billie Jean King National Tennis Center seems much softer and prettier at night, with the fountains bubbling and fans without tickets to the big stadium sitting in the plaza and watching a big screen.

– George Vecsey

Ball caps travel far and wide. They do far more than keep the sun out of your eyes or the cold off your head. Ball caps are a statement.

– George Vecsey

All our lives are enriched by the leadership and excellence and confidence of female athletes, whether the Mia Hamms and Maya Moores we know or the field hockey, lacrosse and track and field athletes we do not necessarily know.

– George Vecsey

Yankee caps pop up all over the world, not as a statement of loyalty to that team, but as a symbol of – what? Winning 27 so-called World Series? Much of the world doesn’t even play that sport.

– George Vecsey

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