Big Game Quotes

“Trump did not come close to passing muster with the Membership. He was, for starters, not considered sufficiently solvent or transparent to proffer a serious bid. Football owners, as it turns out, get a much closer look at a candidate’s finances than electorates do.”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“With its architectural grandeur, Senator Gore said, our capital would someday “make wonderful ruins.”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“This attachment has endured through the years and withstood a steady helmet-slapping of cognitive dissonance over whether I should know better than to keep following this sport as closely as I do. Scary research on posthumous football brains has been as impossible to miss as the testimonials from still-living retirees about the sad state of their bodies. (To wit: “My life sucks,” Jim Plunkett, then sixty-nine, told the San Jose Mercury News in 2017. “Everything hurts.”) If you love football, you get good”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“The worst thing about pro football is that a lot of it has nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels “breaking things down for us” and a whole lot of people you don’t want to deal with or watch on TV [...].”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“Brady has compared playing football with “getting into a car crash every Sunday—a scheduled car crash.” I’ve heard players use this image before, and doctors who have treated football injuries.”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times

“Football is the “secret vice” of the civilized, wrote William Phillips in the journal Commentary in 1969. “Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.”
― Mark Leibovich, Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times