The Only Game in Town Quotes

“For a teenage girl, finding the balance between childhood fearlessness and adult vulnerability can be tougher than landing a triple axel.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Mizner pledged the appearance of Ketchel at another exhibition there, but he couldn’t find his fighter in time. He eventually located Ketchel lying in bed smoking opium with a blonde and a brunette. Mizner was later asked how he met this crisis. “What the hell could I do?” said Mizner. “I said, ‘Move over.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Part of the fun of being a sports fan is harboring the delusion that great athletic achievements are in some sense collaborations between athletes and their rooting sections.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“One day early in his career, Franklin killed the two bulls that had been allotted to him, then, taking the place of two other matadors, who had been gored, killed four more. This set off such an emotional chain reaction in the ring that another bullfighter dropped dead of excitement.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Franklin is neither an improviser nor an accident nor a joker,” wrote the bullfight critic for La Unión, a Seville newspaper. “He is a born bullfighter, with plenty of ambition, which he has had since birth, and for the bulls he has an ultimate quality—serene valor.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody’s brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words pride and champion as his text.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“compromise”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“The difficulty of baseball is imperious.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Our afternoon slid by in a distraction of baseball and memory, and I almost felt myself at some dreamlike doubleheader involving the then and the now—the semi-anonymous strong young men waging their close, marvelous game on the sunlit green field before us while bygone players and heroes of baseball history—long gone now, most of them—replayed their vivid, famous innings for me in the words and recollections of my companion”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“These last figures are firmly emplaced in the baseball crannies of my mind, and in the minds of most students of the game, because, it turned out, they represent the autumn of Joe Wood’s pitching career as well as its first full flowering.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“It was a scoreless game after five, and a beauty.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Ron Darling, a poised, impressive figure on the mound, alternated his popping fastballs with just enough down-breaking sliders and an occasional curveball to keep the St. John’s batters unhappy.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“The real teachers and coaches may offer a charismatic model—they probably have to—but then they insist that all the magic they have to offer is a commitment to repetition and perseverance. The great oracles may enthrall, but the really great teachers demystify. They make particle physics into a series of diagrams that anyone can follow, football into a series of steps that anyone can master, and art into a series of slides that anyone can see. A guru gives us himself and then his system; a teacher gives us his subject, and then ourselves.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“A lot of customers came to the club. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club. Realizing this lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had to make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Superb athletes fascinate in part because they seem like proxies for ourselves in a metaphorical battle with the eternal: broken records are death-negating acts.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Legions of eight-year-old girls were pursuing both skaters everywhere. Too young to have learned “Thrilled to meet you!” or other adult forms of flattery, the little girls just studied Tara and Michelle with hard dolls’ eyes while waiting for their heroines to sign their autograph books.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Suffering is to cyclists what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well they are doing their job.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“he wished that he had been more faithful as a child in heeding the advice of his boxing teacher. After all, the old masters did know something. There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker

“I surmised that this project would prove a mistake, like Mr. Churchill’s attempt to take Gallipoli in 1915, but it would be the kind of mistake that would look good in his memoirs.”
― David Remnick, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker