Sports

"And within the small amount of airtime received, the coverage of women's athletics is also more likely to be sexualised, portraying athletes off court and out of uniform, with an emphasis "on their physical attractiveness rather than their athletic competence", says Tucker Centre's director Mary Jo Kane."

"It is a self-perpetuating, "chicken and egg" cycle, equity advocators argue - audiences will not get excited about women's sport as it gets minimal exposure in the media, and the media would justify the lack of coverage by saying that female athletics do not generate enough audience engagement. "That is not a fair argument, you have to invest first at many levels, including marketing and promotion, to get the general public more involved, and then the return of the investment will be better," says Frey."

""Had our culture been used to seeing women rather than men playing rugby or football for generations, we would find the idea of men playing sports rather novel," adds Hathorn."

""I would promote that boys and girls play the same sports from primary school, because at that stage there are no major physical differences between them. If within the education system children start to play sports together, it would make a real difference in society," says Hathorn. "If we are closing the gap in the long term, we should really be working with young girls to help them change their behaviour, understand that sport is fun and it's something they are entitled to just as much as the boys," says Ruth Holdaway."

"There is an untapped market for the promotion of women's events and experts believe it is actually not just fair in principle, but also a good investment. "It is not a matter of charity, it is a matter of smart business decisions," says Frey. "Corporations are now very interested in gender equality, if I were a company sponsoring for example the Premier League I would be asking myself 'is this the right image for my company?', 'is being too bloke-y dangerous for my brand?'", says Hathorn. "'We have 50% of our clients who are women but we spend 99% of our money on sponsoring men's sports, is that right?' It clearly isn't"."

"If the CCP feels compelled to lace even sports competitions with warnings against practitioners or unregistered Christians, it suggests that the real endurance test is not on the hills of Yiwu, but in the Party’s relentless race to control belief itself."

"If somebody whispered to me, "You can have your pick," If kind fortune came to woo me, when the gold was thick, I would still, by hill and hollow, round the world away, Stirring deeds of contest follow, till I'm bent and gray."

"If all the year were playing holidays; to sport would be as tedious as work."

"God has enjoined us to deal calmly, gently, quietly, and peacefully with the Holy Spirit, because these things are alone in keeping with the goodness of His nature, with His tenderness and sensitiveness. ... Well, how shall this be made to accord with the shows? For the show always leads to spiritual agitation, since where there is pleasure, there is keenness of feeling giving pleasure its zest; and where there is keenness of feeling, there is rivalry giving in turn its zest to that. Then, too, where you have rivalry, you have rage, bitterness, wrath and grief, with all bad things which flow from them—the whole entirely out of keeping with the religion of Christ."

"The addiction to sports ... marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature."

"Like modern sports generally, golf began to surge in popularity in the latter part of the 19th century, spreading far beyond its Scottish origins. The first Amateur Championship was held in 1885, and this, along with the patronage of leading figures, notably the politician and later Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, led to a middle-class boom in golfing all over Britain and beyond. Real wages rose by over 60 percent between 1870 and 1890, which also expanded the middle class and gave more people disposable income."

"In Georgian England there already existed a porous 'genteel' class including the lesser landed gentry, merchants, clerics, business and professional men; the term 'gentleman' developed as an inclusive one to cover subtle variations in status. The nineteenth century boys' boarding school strengthened and institutionalised the ideal of the 'gentleman' and, significantly, cemented it with the elevation of sporting activity to a moral principle. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, was a key figure in the development of the public school ethos. He was a passionate Christian and dedicated to imprinting Christina spiritual and moral ideals on his pupils. One of these, Thomas Hughes, was deeply influences by Arnold and idealised his beliefs in the bestselling novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays. Arnold himself had never shown the slightest interest in sport, but Hughest made the educational, spiritual and moral value of sport central to his book. His friend, the Christian socialist, Charles Kinglet, developed similar ideas in his novels Westward Ho! and Alton Locke. A journalist coined the term 'muscular Christianity' to describe the new importance these writers ascribed to sport and the moral and religious connotations it had suddenly acquired; muscular Christianity became effectively the label for an ideology or a new vision of the virtuous life: an exclusively masculine one. The ideal expressed the view that a healthy mind and soul should be housed in a healthy body. Sports, especially rugby and cricket, were invaluable. They fostered comradely spirit as well as physical fitness and courage, and they preserved the 'boyishness' of the youth in the man. This was the essential ideal for the builders of the Empire, which the British liked to believe was a moral and civilising crusade. Games and sport rather than 'education and bookishness' were now considered the appropriate means of developing manly men fit both to protect the weak and to promote the patriotic ideals of Empire. Sport was a healthy alternative to the hellish secular temples of debauchery and degeneracy, the theatre and the public house. Even more importantly, organised sports taught certain moral values: fair play, courage in the fact of physical pain, the acceptance of loss and disappointment when losing, strict adherence to rules - the 'stiff upper lip', in other words."

"For neither if there were a good boxer among the people, nor if there were a pentathlete or wrestling, nor again if there were someone swift of foot - which is most honoured of all men's deed of strength - would for this reason a city be better governed."

"Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt."

"I have twice gone fishing with rod and line just because other boys asked me to, but this sport was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook for bait, and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up, and even found courage enough to dissuade other boys from going."

"In genial spring, beneath the quivering shade, Where cooling vapors breathe along the mead, The patient fisher takes his silent stand, Intent, his angle trembling in his hand; With looks unmov'd, he hopes the scaly breed, And eyes the dancing cork, and bending reed."

"When they've got two weeks vacation, they hurry to vacation ground... They swim and they fish, but that's what I do all year round."

"You must lose a fly to catch a trout."

"Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler."

"Much is actually known about and much more is suspected. The serious 's knowledge of these fish draws heavily on science, especially the easygoing, slightly bemused, of the , but it periodically leaves the bare facts behind to take long voyages into and sheer poetry."

"Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

"Northamptonshire Police said that although there are no laws against magnet fishing, they would ask fishers to exercise "due care" when handling objects, such as unexploded World War Two bombs. "[They] can be extremely dangerous, as well as resource-intensive for our response officers.""

"Right now a disproportionate bite out of the ocean is being taken by a relatively small number of countries doing industrial fishing. We’ve got to get over this idea that wildlife from the ocean is essential for our food security. What we now are beginning to understand is the high cost of eating fish. What does it take to make a pound of tuna? A lot of halibut or cod. What makes the halibut? Smaller fish. What do they eat? Krill. Krill eat phytoplankton, zooplankton. Over the years thousands of pounds of phytoplankton make a single pound of tuna. So that tuna is expensive in terms of the carbon that it has captured. The more fish we take out of the sea, the more carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere."

"Roberto Clemente wasn't much of a fisherman. When he was a kid, he was working when he wasn't playing baseball, and when he wasn't doing either, he was sleeping, with time out somewhere along the line for eating. After he became a star, he continued to be too busy to do much fishing even though the waters around his native Puerto Rico are teeming with game fish. Winter ball, his business on the Island, and other and varied activities gave him little time for leisure. Among the latter were his interest in kids, particularly underprivileged kids. And he knew that kids like to go fishing. Last summer Roberto beamed, his dark eyes sparkling, when he discussed with this writer a project underway at his home in Puerto Rico. "We are building a pond and we will stock it with fish so that the kids can come there to fish and have fun. It goes down to a big rock and then makes a sharp turn. It is 330 feet down to the rock and almost that much after the turn." The pond, he said, would be stocked with several species of fresh-water fish indigenous to Puerto Rico, "and trout, too," he added. He didn't say how the kids would get out into the country to the pond to fish. He didn't say where they would get the fishing tackle and bait if they didn't have any of their own. He didn't have to. Knowing Roberto Clemente we knew that he'd get them there, furnish the bait and tackle, and probably throw in a picnic, too. He'll be missed by a lot more people than baseball fans."

"For angling-rod he took a sturdy oak; For line, a cable that in storm ne'er broke; His hook was such as heads the end of pole To pluck down house ere fire consumes it whole; This hook was bated with a dragon's tail,— And then on rock he stood to bob for whale."

"I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn't think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: "Wouldn't you like to have that?" Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?"

"I often read of people who say that when they retire they will go fishing. They say this with an understanding that from then on they won't do any damage to anybody. An epoch of charity and tranquility will begin in their life. It never occurs to them for a moment that innocent beings will suffer and die from this innocent little sport."

"A rod twelve feet long and a ring of wire, A winder and barrel, will help thy desire In killing a Pike; but the forked stick, With a slit and a bladder,—and that other fine trick, Which our artists call snap, with a goose or a duck,— Will kill two for one, if you have any luck; The gentry of Shropshire do merrily smile, To see a goose and a belt the fish to beguile; When a Pike suns himselfe and a-frogging doth go, The two-inched hook is better, I know, Than the ord'nary snaring: but still I must cry, When the Pike is at home, minde the cookery."

"One of the other reasons for the popularity of fishing is that the mute animals have a silent agony. To reassure one's conscience, it is said that they are cold-blooded and don't feel pain. Of course such beliefs are totally without foundation."

"Give me mine angle, we'll to the river; there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws."

"The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish Cut with her golden oars the silver stream, And greedily devour the treacherous bait."

"Fish not, with this melancholy bait, For this fool-gudgeon, this opinion."

"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm."

"Bait the hook well: this fish will bite."

"A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough."

"Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago."

"When if or chance or hunger's powerful sway Directs the roving trout this fatal way, He greedily sucks in the twining bait, And tugs and nibbles the fallacious meat."

"To fish in troubled waters."

"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?"

"A fishing-rod was a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other."

"Fly fishing is a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing, I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other."

"La ligne, avec sa canne, est un long instrument, Dont le plus mince bout tient un petit reptile, Et dont l'autre est tenu par un grand imbecile."

"His angle-rod made of a sturdy oak; His line, a cable which in storms ne'er broke; His hook he baited with a dragon's tail,— And sat upon a rock, and bobb'd for whale."

"Down and back at day dawn, Tramp from lake to lake, Washing brain and heart clean Every step we take. Leave to Robert Browning Beggars, fleas, and vines; Leave to mournful Ruskin Popish Apennines, Dirty stones of Venice, And his gas lamps seven, We've the stones of Snowdon And the lamps of heaven."

"In a bowl to sea went wise men three, On a brilliant night in June: They carried a net, and their hearts were set On fishing up the moon."

"Aqua turbida piscosior est."

"Shrimps and the delicate periwinkle Such are the sea-fruits lasses love: Ho! to your nets till the blue stars twinkle, And the shutterless cottages gleam above!"

"But should you lure From his dark haunt, beneath the tangled roots Of pendent trees, the Monarch of the brook, Behoves you then to ply your finest art."

"Two honest and good-natured anglers have never met each other by the way without crying out, "What luck?""

"'Tis an affair of luck."