Great Sporting Wisdom: Legendary Quotes from the World of Sport
One of the most endearing features of sport is its perennial humour. Witness this extraordinary collection of Freudian slips, true confessions, double entendres and unintentional puns which demonstrates that sporting foot-in-mouth disease is far more rampant than mad cow disease.Players, coaches, commentators and journalists are all represented as well as some famous names who know little about sport but are always good for a quote."I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer but I had some problems with buoyancy."WOODY ALLEN"The first ninety minutes are the most important."BOBBY ROBSON"I was swinging like a toilet door on a prawn trawler."DAVID FEHERTYThe British boys are adopting the attacking position with Cox up."DAN MASKELL
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Harper Non-Fiction
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in 1996 by CollinsWillow
Copyright © John Scally 1996
John Scally accepts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780002187336
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008193263
Version: 2016-06-20
Contents
The Good, The Glad and The Wordy
Chapter One: Athletic Aberrations
Chapter Two: Baseball Bloomers
Chapter Three: Basketball Babel
Chapter Four: Board and Card Games
Chapter Six: Pedal to the Metal
Chapter Seven: Cricket Classics
Chapter Eight: Football’s Fun and Frolics
Chapter Ten: Horse Racing Hoots
Chapter Twelve: Snooker from the Lip
Chapter Thirteen: Tennis Theatricals
Chapter Fourteen: Sporting Miscellany
Great Sporting Supermouths of our Time
Chapter Fifteen: Walker the Talker
Chapter Sixteen: The Lowe-Down
Chapter Seventeen: On the Great Vine
In 1906 Ambrose Bierce defined quotation as ‘the act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.’ Down through history much has been said and written about the people and events that have shaped the sporting world. This book assembles some of the most commonly misquoted and misattributed of those sporting quotations.
Humour is a difficult thing to define. What reduces one person to helpless laughter may leave another indifferent. And what makes a funny quote? The context can be crucial.
In normal circumstances the following would not be of great interest: ‘Sharp are currently working on bringing 3D TV into your living-rooms. Mr Koshima hopes it will be so realistic that viewers will have to duck when Eric Cantona takes a shot.’
However, what makes this press release from Manchester United’s sponsors such a gem is that it was issued just before Cantona’s flying kick at a Crystal Palace fan. Of course, Cantona has carved a special niche for himself in this field with the immortal ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.’ No doubt this remark will be the subject of PhD theses in years to come in such disparate disciplines as philosophy, Anglo-French literature and sporting psychology.
The quote ‘Because we are dressed in black and white, the red, yellow, green, brown, blue and pink of the balls appeal to us’ may not seem very noteworthy. It becomes interesting when the source is revealed as Mother John Baptist of the Benedictine Order of the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, who pray for the one hundred martyrs of the Reformation, during a snooker competition among the sisters to raise funds for their London convent.
Innuendo is another favoured verbal weapon in sporting quotes. An example is a remark, often attributed to Jilly Cooper, about a different form of sailing game: ‘I never liked sailing men. They yell blue murder at you all day, but then, when the boat is moored, the whisky comes out, “Captain Bligh” turns into Casanova and is all ready to play deck coitus.’
In 1890 Samuel Butler observed: ‘It is bad enough to see one’s own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people’s rubbish fathered upon oneself.’ Received wisdom is often incorrect. Cary Grant boasted: ‘I improve on misquotation.’ This book may also serve as an arbitration facility for long-standing disputes about who said what. The target audience is any reader with a sense of humour, or an eye for the eccentric or simply ridiculous, but obviously this will mean more to the sports enthusiast. One preliminary warning – the truth is often funnier than fiction.
John Scally
Rathmines, Dublin
Robert Burns once stated: ‘I like to have quotations ready for every occasion … they save one the trouble of finding expression adequate to one’s feelings.’ At its best, athletics has the power to make the pulse miss a beat. Whatever your sporting fancy, this collection of quotations recreates the unique excitement, drama and unpredictability of athletics in the words of the sport’s practitioners. Anyone who’s anyone in the athletics game may find themselves quoted here in their scurrilous, unguarded, rude and humorous moments. A newspaper is rather caustically defined by George Bernard Shaw as a device ‘unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.’ Hence it is no surprise that the media presence in this section is very strong.
