42 quotes found
"The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us."
"It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler... You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Lutz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace. The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again. He was killed in World War II."
"When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn't ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either."
"Mr. Hitler had to leave the stadium early, but after winning I hurried up to the radio booth. When I passed near the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me and I waved back at him.""
"Hitler didn't snub me; it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."
"I'm old now. It's all right."
"Another old friend gone!"
"The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself — the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us — that's where it's at."
"People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway."
"I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn't a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward."
"Joe Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black... But neither of us could do national advertising because the South wouldn't buy it. That was the social stigma we lived under."
"We used to have a lot of fun. We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn't have steak? Who had steak?"
"She was unusual because even though I knew her family was as poor as ours, nothing she said or did seemed touched by that. Or by prejudice. Or by anything the world said or did. It was as if she had something inside her that somehow made all that not count. I fell in love with her some the first time we ever talked, and a little bit more every time after that until I thought I couldn't love her more than I did. And when I felt that way, I asked her to marry me … and she said she would."
"It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close."
"I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I'd learned long ago... the only victory that counts is the one over yourself."
"To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten. The first "second" is when you come out of the blocks. The next is when you look up and take your first few strides to attain gain position. By that time the race is actually about half over. The final "second" — the longest slice of time in the world for an athlete — is that last half of the race, when you really bear down and see what you're made of. It seems to take an eternity, yet is all over before you can think what's happening."
"I decided I wasn't going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever."
"It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere — one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know."
"After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job."
"It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn't even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards. … The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred's ear."
"We'd get into these little towns and tell 'em to get out the fastest guy in town and Jesse Owens would spot him ten yards and beat him."
"People who worked with me or knew me still called me the "world's fastest human" because I almost never stopped. I'd found that I could get more done with no regular job or regular hours at all, but by being on my own, flying to speak here, help with a public relations campaign for some client there, tape my regular jazz radio show one morning at 5:00 a.m. before leaving on a plane for another city or another continent three hours later to preside over a major sporting event."
"It's like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it."
"The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers — weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside. There's where the power lies."
"Hitler Salutes Jesse Owens"
"The real snub of Owens came from his own president. Even after ticker-tape parades for Owens in New York City and Cleveland, President Franklin D. Roosevelt never publicly acknowledged Owens' achievements. Gold in the 100 meter, 200 meter, 400 meter relay, and long jump. Owens was never invited to the White House and never even received a letter of congratulations from the president. Almost two decades passed before another American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, honored Owens by naming him 'Ambassador of Sports'. In 1955."
"You smoke? That's no good. No good!"
"Well you know, that's still my first love. I'll die and say that I was a DB. But you know, there's still time —— there's still time in my life to still be able to fulfill my dream."
"I didn't end it [my career at Ohio State] the way I'd like to end it, but I ended the way I had to. That's a bad memory, but at the same time, we made it to the national championship game. I scored in the national championship game. That's the only way I can remember it."
"I'm not the type of guy who is greedy. I take what they give me. If they say, 'Hey, go to quarterback,' I go to quarterback. I just have that type of mind.'"
"Records are made to be broken. Someone else will come along and break it [the record of punts returned for touchdowns], and that's great. You're only here for a short time in your life, so just go out and have fun with it."
"You have to be patient. I want to be the possession receiver, the go-to guy. When it's time for a big play, they can come to me."
"In order to be the go-to guy, you must have everything right. You have to be on point with your routes and catch the ball no matter where the quarterback puts it. You just have to have confidence. I'm rolling, and I want to go out and have fun."
"Once you see a touchdown, there's no need to make a move. You just use your speed."
"First there's God, then there's Glenville, then there's myself."
"He's a game changer. Every time he gets the ball, you hold your breath."
"I am going to have somebody put something in his food the morning of the game."
"I think he's a great football player. I think he's shown that from the moment he got to Ohio State."
"Here is guy who came to us as a return specialist and defensive back and has developed into a very good receiver. Has always had great hands and he has become a very good route runner. With his speed, he is a threat to score anytime he touches the ball."
"He's pretty special. He's probably a little bit better on nine toes than most people are on 10."
"I used to think that I needed chicken and fish as a source of protein in order to train properly. I subscribed to that theory for a while and then when I finally decided to cut everything out and I was doing it right, it felt really good and I didn’t lose any strength at all–I feel like I recover quicker so it’s been good. … A lot of people try to stay away from carbs and stuff like that, but I eat a lot of brown rice and just good clean complex carbs and it works for me. … In this day and age I don’t see any reason to contributing to a really awful industry [sc. the meat industry] that causes too many problems. It’s horrible what the animals have to go through on a daily basis, it’s just awful–they’re born and raised in really nasty conditions and it’s better not to contribute to that whole thing. … I just don’t see in this day and age a real reason to contribute to that when you can be really healthy and not eat that sort of thing and not cause a lot of suffering."
"[In my family] we read books on the subject—a lot of them—and came to the conclusion that, because of the number and amounts of hormones now used to fatten animals, meat isn't healthy. … [Vegetarianism] helped my cycling some, but the diet is more important over the long run and later in life."