“Youth sports could not exist without millions of volunteers and modestly paid coaches who teach our children how to skate and catch and dribble and also how to get along with others.”

“Hockey suffers from being compared to itself in ways that other sports are not. Every four years, some of us fawn over Olympic hockey, a great event with bigger rinks, minimal goonishness and natio...”

“Some anthems are great for sports. You've got the Russian national anthem... 'O Canada,' how wonderful is that for hockey... but I chose the Italian national song because at my first World Cup, I s...”

“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 ...”

“Television is making sports universal; for the same reason, big-time soccer is growing more popular in the United States.”

“There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did.”

“Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.”

“Never compete with someone who has nothing to lose.”

“I compete every moment, and my competition is only with myself.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“Guess our sex is hot, we start fires.”

“I won't sugarcoat shit. You're tiptoeing on the line between batshit crazy and sane.”

“Payback's a bitch, but thankfully those tissues are only full of snot and tears instead of dead little sperms.”