Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
August 16, 2002, Washington Post

You Can Quote Me

The black-and-white film flickers. A man, dressed in New York Yankees pinstripes, stands with his head bowed before a microphone, like a ghost from a long ago time. His words echo in a hushed stadium.

"Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

The man was Lou Gehrig, maybe the greatest first baseman in the history of baseball. Gehrig said those words in 1939, even though he knew that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that would kill him two years later. A disease that is now often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Gehrig's brave words are one of sports' most famous quotes. They are so famous and familiar that they are part of a credit card television ad campaign this summer. Here are some more famous sports sayings that have lasted through the years.

"Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

Vince Lombardi, the great Green Bay Packers football coach, later admitted he regretted saying this. He didn't think that players should cheat or be bad sports. But Lombardi's words still inspire athletes to do (almost) anything to win.

"A winner never quits and a quitter never wins."

Knute Rockne was another tough-as-nails football coach, for Notre Dame, who knew that a player is never really beaten until he or she stops trying.

"Nice guys finish last."

Baseball managers can be just as tough as football coaches. Leo "the Lip" Durocher (he used to argue with umpires a lot) was a famous baseball manager who believed that tough guys usually come out on top.

"The bigger they come, the harder they fall."

Bob Fitzsimmons was the world heavyweight boxing champion more than 100 years ago. He was not a big man for a boxer. But he believed, and proved, that it isn't the size of the man in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the man.

Not all sports quotes are tough talk. Some can really make you stop and think. Grantland Rice, a sportswriter in the 1920s, when writers in the papers would try their hand at poetry, once wrote:

For when the Great Scorer comes
To write against your name.
He marks -- not that you won or lost --
But how you played the game.

One of my favorites is a quotation on a plaque at the Palestra, a college basketball arena in Philadelphia:

"To play the game is great. . . .
To win the game is greater. . . .
But to love the game is the greatest of all."

Of course, sports are fun too. And no one has had more funny things to say about sports than Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees. Yogi proved that he was much better hitter than mathematician when he said:

"Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical."

So I will give the final word to Yogi and his common-sense remark about the never-say-die attitude that everybody needs sometimes:

"It ain't over till it's over."

Fred Bowen writes KidsPost's Friday sports column and is the author of sports novels for kids. Most of these quotations are taken from "The Ultimate Dictionary of Sports Quotations" by Carlo De Vito.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company