Athlete Quotes

Announcers don't do enough of the cat-and-mouse strategy and all the work that goes into it. You watch a broadcast and guys get the pitches wrong.

My end goal in the piano is to play Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag.'

My dad, we'll be talking about goals for the next year. He's like, 'I think you can be here,' and I look at him like he's cross-eyed, like, 'Are you serious? That's so far out of my reach.' Well, then I always end up achieving it.

My dad keeps referring to me playing the piano when he's trying to teach me something in archery.

I really enjoy playing the piano. I took lessons throughout middle school, but I had to drop the lessons. I actually got too busy, but I hope to pick up the lessons when I'm in college if I can.

Everything I did in P.E. was just awful. Archery was just something that we did as a father/daughter activity, and it just kind of grew out of that, really.

In piano, if you try to force hitting this key and that key, it's very broken. It's not pretty. When you're in archery, you can't try to force it step-by-step-by-step. Then the shot doesn't flow and it's not a good shot. If you just let the performance flow, it's really beautiful.

You should enter a ballpark the way you enter a church.

When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up. It's like the Constitution, which says separate church and state. You have to separate mind and body.

The only rule I got is if you slide, get up.

Kids don't learn the fundamentals of baseball at the games anymore.

I'm mad at Hank Aaron for deciding to play one more season. I threw him his last home run and thought I'd be remembered forever. Now, I'll have to throw him another.

The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.

That was real baseball. We weren't playing for money. They gave us Mickey Mouse watches that ran backwards.

People are too hung up on winning. I can get off on a really good helmet throw.

Most of the managers are lifetime .220 hitters. For years pitchers have been getting these managers out 75% of the time and that's why they don't like us.

I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.

I think about the cosmic snowball theory. A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won't matter if I get this guy out.

The more self-centered and egotistical a guy is, the better ballplayer he's going to be.

You have two hemispheres in your brain - a left and a right side. The left side controls the right side of your body and right controls the left half. It's a fact. Therefore, left-handers are the only people in their right minds.

I try to make the good days great and take something positive from the days I'm not feeling good - work on technique or something like that.

You don't suffer, kill yourself and take the risks I take just for money. I love bike racing.

There are so many people who have died of cycling, and that didn't happen when I was racing.

Testing, we will never do enough of it.

Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made. Sincere apologies are for those that make them, not for those to whom they are made.

Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time.

It is cycling as a professional sport that represents the problem. It can transform someone into a liar.

I'm more optimistic about cycling right now than I've ever been.

I rode in a nine-day charity ride recently, averaged 43km a day and still finished in the lead group. I'm 38, not quite finished yet.

I know too that we Americans like to think of ourselves as cleaner than clean, a healthy nation who would never take anything when a recent poll suggested that 65 per cent of the population would risk dying in 10 years if they would be guaranteed Olympic gold.