sports-writers

"Rugby backs can be identified because they generally have clean jerseys and identifiable partings in their hair. Come the revolution the backs will be the first to be lined up against the wall and shot for living parasitically off the work of others."

"But I was thrilled to bits just to see them and I asked my mother at the interval whether I could meet them. She asked the theatre manager and he came back with a note. It said: "Yes, but don't bring your mother …" The manager took me to the door of their dressing room and knocked, but left before Hardy answered the door. "Come in, young man," he said. "We have tea and buns on the way for you. This is Stan, by the way, as you can see by his hat. He seldom takes its off, even in bed." I was tongue-tied. But when the tray of tea and buns came in, I tucked in enthusiastically. Whereupon Hardy took a bun from the tray, placed it on his chair and sat on it. It was, of course, squashed flat. I'm pretty sure he did it to amuse me. But you never knew with Hardy, who preferred playing golf to working."

"Throughout his career he has unashamedly hopped from one outside influence to another in an attempt to clothe the content of his films in a form which will surprise and shock. He has sloganised, fantasised and parodied as well as presenting us with neo-realism, documentary and even Chekovian pastiche. But that is only the half of it. His films also show the seminal influence of a great deal of Indian popular and folk culture. He will beg, borrow or steal from anything to form an appropriately striking style and, for all that, still remain resolutely his own man."

"All [[w:Mrinal Sen|[Mrinal] Sen]]'s films, even his most lightweight, have attacked, with undisguised horror and anger, the poverty, exploitation and inherent hypocrisy of Indian society. That is why he has remained a hero for so many of the young, who criticise [[w:Satyajit Ray|[Satyajit] Ray]] for a lack of overt political commitment and wish to see a truly revolutionary Indian cinema undiluted by European classicist and humanist sympathies. Yet, like Ray, he is certainly not a specifically Indian director whose films show no outside influences at work. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk with him – and he is an indefatigable talker – without constant reference to European, Russian and particularly English culture, often literary rather than cinematic."

"No film I ever saw was any more dramatic than the story of my parents, whose marriage was so soon overtaken by a tragedy that received huge publicity and effectively destroyed the happiness of both."

"[How Malcolm began a film critic] I was on the Gloucestershire Echo and wrote to Brian Redhead, who was the Manchester Guardians arts editor, asking if I could write about the Cheltenham literary festival. He said I might send my piece in and it was published, and he told me to come and see him. I knew Redhead was a socialist and if he knew I was at Eton and Oxford I would never get a job. So he asked me where I went to school and I said: "Somewhere near Slough". I ended up as a designer, and then called down to London where I was the late-night sub and the only one who could read the reviews by Neville Cardus [the renowned music critic and cricket correspondent] who submitted his copy in longhand. I became the letters editor, and – because I had been an amateur jockey in the 1960s — the racing correspondent. I was also the deputy drama critic to Philip Hope-Wallace, who took great delight in sending me to review Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. I became the film critic because the editor fired the existing critic, Richard Roud, for writing a one-word review of The Sound of Music — he just wrote "No". Just that."

"Personally, I regret the absence of Sirk, Boetticher, Donen, Vertov, Tourneur, Whale, Kazan, Boorman, Malle and Roeg, but recognise that Malcolm is making a statement by omitting Spielberg. There are no Australian directors represented, and no SF flicks. All lists reveal something about the compiler, and there's a lot of sex and socialism here."

"I've had the luck if that is what you call it to get stuck in a lift with the great Orson Welles and his large wolfhound to take tea with Charlie Chaplin and to interview the always testy John Ford. Ford hated critics and had stomach trouble at the time He summoned me into the room as follows: "Come on in. I can deal with two shits at once"."

"To publish a book on the "100 best films of the century" is really putting your head on the block, even if that "best" is qualified as "personal". Derek Malcolm's choice strikes me as sound and stimulating, a mixture of the conservative and the adventurous."

"Jeanne Moreau was the perfect choice for Catherine: she gives a performance full of gaiety and charm without conveying an empty-headed bimbo. She makes the watcher understand that this is no ordinary woman whom both men adore. It is possibly the most complete portrait of any feminine character in the entire ouevre of the New Wave and it made her an international star."

"Jules et Jim seemed revolutionary at the time, but Truffaut's revolution, unlike Godard's, implied not so much the destruction of the past as a turning back to the humanism of Vigo, Renoir and the French cinema of the 30s. The film's "rondo of love" represents both a backward glance at the best of the past and a forward glance into the cinema's future. Its enthusiasm for what the cinema is and can be is what makes it so special."

"For [[w:Thomas Mann|[Thomas] Mann]]'s interior dialogue is substituted some of the most ravishingly wrought images Visconti has ever committed to the screen. Aschenbach’s arrival at the Hotel des Bains of the early century is meticulously detailed and observed. His first sight of the boy, in the bosom of his Polish family, his sniffing out of the cholera epidemic which suddenly decimates the tourists, his ill-at-ease attempts to refurbish himself with the help of the hotel barber, all these episodes could scarcely be better done in terms of direction, art direction and acting. True, the camera lingers lovingly on what has been created. There are times when Visconti scarcely seems concerned about moving the story onwards. Yet it serves its purpose quite as well at Mann’s prose. It is in the final half hour that one's doubts grow, as the boy smiles and smiles at the man, and the man visibly dies under the untouching assault. Perhaps it is here that Dirk Bogarde's otherwise superb performance shows a bit at the seams. We become aware that he is an actor acting, manoeuvring a mask, and that Visconti is watching him do it, lost in admiration."

"And he [Bryant] was a smart enough man to know that all kinds of great football players from Alabama, some of whom just happened to be black and were not able to play for him because of the prevailing prejudice, in many cases young men who were on their way to the pros, and he knew as well that he had the law of the nation on his side now if he wanted to play them, and that only local prejudice kept him from recruiting them, and most important of all, he was the one man in all of Alabama who could go ahead and recruit them, and stand up to George Wallace, and bring the culture along with him. And for 13 years, when he could have made a great difference, he did very little and did not really dissent from the biases of the region."

"We underestimated the willingness of these peasants to pay the price. We won every set piece battle. Westy believes that he never lost a battle. We had absolute military superiority, and they had absolute political superiority, which meant that we would kill 200 and they would replenish them the next day. We were fighting the birth rate of a nation."

"James Jerpe, the sporting writer of Pittsburg [sic] who has been blind for the two past years but continues his good work in the game in spite of that affliction, may be tendered a benefit game. is working it up. His plan is for a team of National League stars to meet a team of American League stars, the receipts of the game to go to Jerpe. It is some test of the popularity of a writer when ball players will turn a hand for him."

"Pitt is credited with having been the first team to identify its football players by numbers on the uniforms. It started many years ago as a bright idea to sell more programs. Yesterday I learned another version from Jim Jerpe Jr., son of a famous baseball writer for the old Gazette Times. He says that when he registered at Pitt, from which he was graduated as a chemical engineer, he was told by the late Karl E. Davis, the then graduate athletic manager, that Jim's dad was responsible for the numbering, which Davis instituted. It seems, according to what Davis said, that Jerpe Sr. complained about the difficulty of covering football games in those days before elevated press boxes, when writers trudged up and down the field, and in protest wrote a story in which he reported that a player named Joe passed the ball to another player named Joe, who took off on a run and was stopped by another player named Joe."

"When a man of his natural physique can eat what he wants, drink what he wants and do what he pleases in the open air all the year around, it isn't any wonder that he prolongs his athletic career and stands off the slowness and staleness that comes to the best of them as the years go by. [...] Honus has a poetic nature in this respect, although he is anything but a poet. But the open air, the trees, the streams and the wild freedom of the woods have a fancy for him, and in this environment only is he happy. Is it any wonder then that he retains his vigor and conserves much of that dash and speed that makes him the annual wonder on the ball field?"

"Official scorers, rule makers and others identified with the statistical end of baseball, should get together soon on a uniform system of scoring, particularly with regard to what is and what is not a base hit. The "baseball uplifters" have ceased their racket; football is over and plenty of time can now be given to a matter that is very important, but which, it seems, has been neglected for many years, particularly last year, when official scorers were hopelessly divided in the matter of scoring a fielder's choice that comes up when a batsman sets out to advance a runner by sacrificing, but gets his base through a play that fails to get the man ahead of him. In some cities they scored this play a hit; in others they gave the batsman nothing excepting a time at bat and still in others the scorers compromised by scoring it a sacrifice hit. A season of this kind of scoring could render team batting figures obsolete. Such a play may come up just often enough in one city where it is scored a base hit to make a material difference in team batting over the club in another city where the scorer does nothing but charge the very successful bunter with a time at bat when a perfect play is made on the man going to second and fails, allowing both runners to land safely."

"If harmony and spirit get a club anything the sensational Phillies are getting it: A visit to the bench yesterday revealed the rare thing of a ball club cemented together by warm friendships for the manager and among the men. The old Phils of Dooin days and the youngsters as well, took occasion to whisper a word for Pat. Evidently Pat is a pal as well as a boss. At least every last player is for him and his policies."

"[T]he voice of a man... flowed from the speakers... too melodious to sound natural... instructed me to inhale slowly through our noses, then exhale slowly. To focus on our breath."

"[M]y doctor... told me, "A breathing class could help." ...strengthen my failing lungs, calm my frazzled mind, maybe give me perspective."

"[S]omething happened. ...[I]t was as if I'd been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant. ...I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if I'd just run a marathon."

"[I]f we're able to understand just the rudiments of this communication, we may be able to save them. ...70% of the population is gone, and it's declining very quickly."

"It's going to a lot harder to kill an animal that's able to speak its name."

"The whales welcomed them into their pods, started shooting them with echolocation to figure out what they were, and then started shooting them with... communication clicks. ...[T]his lasted for a series of days ..."

"Japan and Iceland... want to keep hunting sperm whales, and are petitioning to do that... [I]f we're able to prove their intelligence and their capacity for communication we might be able to establish them some... rights."

"[F]or the first time... in human history we have the technology and... methods to... understand these animals and crack into their code..."

"In the next 10 years the U.S. ...is going to spend $100 million looking for signs of intelligent non-human life in the skies. But there's already intelligent non-human life... on our planet deep beneath the sea. It's been trying to reach out to us for thousands of years... [W]e should start talking back."

"I'd just recovered from pneumonia, which I'd also had the year before and the year before that. I was... wheezing, working, and eating... in a rut—physically, mentally [etc.]"

"I... signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn... Sudarshan Kriya."

"The animals are usually very wary of scuba but... they saw something similar to themselves. ...[W]hales also have mammalian dive reflexes. That's how they're able to dive down to 8,000 feet for 90 minutes..."

"The sperm whale's brain is about 6 times the size of ours... They've had it for 15 million year longer... We've had our current size brain around 200,000 years."

"A group of scientists, acoustic engineers and free divers have... the goal of trying to crack the sperm whale communication code in the next 2 years. ...We're going to use and AI algorithms... We're already doing this with mice... bats..."

"The next day I felt even better. ...[T]here was a feeling of calm and quiet that I hadn't experienced in a long time. ...The tension was gone from my shoulders and neck. This lasted a few days..."

"Lilly... wanted to... figure out the communication code. He said these animals are by far the most intelligent... on the planet. They have a form of communication that is far more sophisticated than ours. But you can't quite put a 60 foot long whale into a lab."

"Back in the 60s... John Lilly had a lab... dedicated to solving the dolphin communication problem..."

"So for the past 50 years we've been... studying these animals from the deck of a boat. Now this is very limiting. You can't see... you... have to put... s off the deck... But... they've found... that... sperm whales have dialects... they can shoot this click communication in focused sound beams to other whales across great distances... [T]hese sperm whales can cram 1600 micro-clicks into a single second... and move discreet frequencies around..."

"I swam with these animals about 4 years ago. Some friends and I had heard that off the coast of Sri Lanka these huge congregations of s would gather in March and April."

"I found out later that these clicks are actually used for communication. These animals also use them to see in the deep ocean. ...It's a form of called echolocation."

"If you compare the ocean to the human body... current exploration... is equivalent to snapping a photograph of a finger..."

"At three hundred feet... pressure... is ten times that at the surface. ...The organs collapse. The heart beats at a quarter of its normal rate, slower than... in a . Senses disappear. The brain enters a dream state."

"These animals came up to us, welcomed us into their pods and started showering us with these clicks."

"Inside of these clicks is encoded information... a secret language..."

"[T]he more you focus in on these clicks, the tinier... they get, [growing] into more complex structures. ...[O]ther ns such as dolphins and orcas also use these. It's this secret language... discrete codes... down to the millisecond."

"He had a dolphin telephone... and he would listen in as these dolphins would have these very complex conversations..."

"He... had dolphin English language immersion workshops... where... an intern [would] grant dolphins sexual favors if they learned English words, and this... worked."

"[A]fter around 30 feet... the water stops buoying you... and starts dragging you down to the sea floor. ...[T]he deeper ...the more your body changes. ...Your organs allow for the free flow of fluids so they don't collapse. Your brain waves slow down. Your heart rate will slow to about 1/3 its resting rate."

"[T]he lowest recorded heart rate [of a free diver]... was 7 beats per minute... about 1/2 of someone in a ..."

"[T]he divers were able to commune with these animals for hours... and get footage that no one else has ever gotten."

"[T]hese clicks are so loud you can actually feel them in your body. Your body starts heating up after a few minutes."