Sports Writers

"Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory."

"No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day."

"One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all."

"It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent."

"That morning began with wind and hairy clouds. It was late March and the day rose brisk and uncertain, with gusts suggesting January and flashes of sun promising June. In every way, a season of change had come."

"Surely these fine athletes, those boys of summer, have found their measure of ruin."

"One thing a writer has, if he is fortunate, and I have been fortunate, is a partnership with the years."

"Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments."

"He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him strong. If one can be certain of anything in baseball, it is that we shall not look upon his like again."

"One did not go to Ebbets Field for sociology. Exciting baseball was the attraction, and a wonder of the sociological Brooklyn Dodgers was the excitement of their play."

"You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it."

"At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams."

"In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game."

"Is that the minds last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember? There is no rustling of old crowds as my long, wrenching, joyous voyage ended, only the question, "Who will remember?""

"It is both a pointless and a churlish thing to praise the old days at the expense of the new, though there are a number of things a man might reasonably have preferred to commercial television and the hydrogen bomb."

"I had devoted too much of my life to this utterly irrational game. I would chuck the whole thing and take to Strindberg for amusement."

"Cricket is the most senior, widespread and deeply rooted of English games."

"God, whose farm is all creation, take the gratitude we give; take the finest of our harvest, crops we grow that all may live."

"We've got a freaker! We’ve got a freaker down the wicket now. Not very shapely and it's masculine. And I would think it's seen the last of its cricket for the day. The police are mustered, so are the cameramen, and Greg Chappell. And now he's being embraced by a blond policeman. And this may be his last public appearance but what a splendid one. He's now being marched down in the final exhibition past at least 8,000 people in the Mound Stand, some of whom perhaps have never seen anything quite like this before. And he's getting a very good reception."

"At any rate, it would detract sadly from the richness of the game if deduction of character from a player's style was a forbidden pursuit, for undoubtedly the main reason why cricketers are remembered for years, for decades, after the heroes of other sports are forgotten is that they set the impress of character, apart from technical batting or bowling, on the minds of those who watched them, and whether that cricket-character falsely represented the real man is, in the last analysis, unimportant."

"A game of cricket is at work from the first ball to the last in shaping an outline or design for itself. Sometimes the design degenerates into dullness and incompetence, but design there always is, and there is an interest even in the tracing of the course and impulse of its failures."

"Cricket's all right in spite of the newspapers, but the trouble is that three quarters of us don't know how to use our own gifts."

"He was certainly one of that company who tried to raise descriptions of matches from mere reporting to literature."

"We hope that Wisden is a constant, helping the reader to make sense of it all and providing a little contemplative calm."

"And here come the Left Brothers — Al "747" Sharpton and Jesse "DC 10" Jackson — barreling in for a landing on top of Goodell's dome. And this time every black person with an ounce of common sense and self-respect is riding shotgun with Jesse and Al, who have justifiably voiced their displeasure with Limbaugh's ownership bid."

"Having failed as an NFL commentator, Limbaugh understands the power of football."

"I'm not mad at Limbaugh. He expresses no shame to the game he's been running for two decades. He's an opportunistic, race-baiting, anti-black entertainer. The popularity of the gangsta element of hip-hop music culture has allowed Limbaugh to proudly claim that his form of entertainment is mainstream."

"Colly doing a good, no-frills, manful job for England here, just one from the over. He is to cricket what Jim Taggart is to detective work."

"Bit of Toto as Hoffmann makes his way to the middle - "I bless the rains down in Africa!" - smashing. My favourite Toto number is Rosanna. I used to go out with someone called Rosanna. Her mum looked like Cher."

"Hayden marches down the pitch towards Collymore, bat raised, as if he's just returned from the theatre to find him rifling through his wife."

"Vaughan is lurking in the dressing room gloom like some mad woman spying into her next door neighbours' garden."

"A well-deserved standing ovation from the Lord's faithful and what can you say about any Collingwood innings? Nuggety, earthy, gritty. All hail Ross Kemp - give that man his own cop show on ITV."

"Oof! McCullum kerplunks a fuller Sidebottom delivery for what looks a certain four until it smashes into Gillespie's, erm, mummy-daddy button at the non-striker's end and he is denied a run. That had to hurt. Gillespie turns down the opportunity to have it treated by the Kiwi physio - perhaps he's not his type."

"Monty went beserk, like a toddler who's just been told he can't have a Happy Meal."

"Hayden hits his fourth four of the over off the final ball, riding a dreamy steer through the covers. Boom boom boom let me hear you say way-ooh."

"Embarrassing cricket tales. When I was about 14, my school team played against a school called Langdon, somewhere or other in the wilds of East London. They batted first and racked up 180-3 off 20 overs. We got 13. My PE teacher called it the most humiliating day of his life. Years later, he got done for sex offences. I wonder what he thinks now."

"Umpire Billy Bowden is decked by a Jones sweep! How marvellous...I mean what a choker...A sweetly-timed shot by the England batsman, which strikes Bowden on the hip, sending sunnies and walkie-talkie flying. Shame for Jones, that was going for four. Bowden will have secretly loved that, the old drama tart."

"Having seen the replay, I think Steve Bucknor was right. I like Bucknor, in fact, he might be my only friend."

"I'd imagine Janowicz is a fine lover - a big, bear of a man but with the hands of a miniature portrait painter."

"There's Jamie Murray in the crowd - I assume that's his woman, otherwise her actual boyfriend might be extremely irate."

"I've got a horrible feeling that if United do do the business tonight, Scholes won't be on the pitch in Athens. He may well be the best player England have produced for the last 15 years, but he has all the tackling ability of a granny on roller skates."

"Anyone seen Kaka's wife? Funnily enough, she's a complete sort. She's the sort of woman who, if she looked you in the eye in a bar and asked you where the fag machine was, you'd start giggling and snort."

"Murali is really struggling out there, he looked like Heather Mills McCartney making her way to bed from her en suite bathroom fielding down at fine-leg."

"I like Monty, I'd like to sit with my arm round him on the sofa all night watching documentaries on BBC Four."

"Just two from the over, Anderson tighter than Andy Fordham's watch strap."

"In some respects, the life of a censor is more exhilarating than that of an emperor. The best the emperor can do is snip off the heads of men and women, who are mere mortals. The censor can decapitate ideas which but for him might have lived forever."

"Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian."

"Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anyone else."

"Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God."

"There is no proselyter half so energetic as the hard-shelled atheist."