Roger Kahn quotes

Horse racing is animated roulette. (Roger Kahn)
Tennis and golf are best played, not watched. View quote
Roger Kahn
Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed. View quote
Roger Kahn
Football is violence and cold weather and sex and college rye. View quote
Roger Kahn
You may glory in a team triumphant... But you fall in love with a team in defeat. View quote
Roger Kahn
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. View quote
Roger Kahn
Surely these fine athletes, those boys of summer, have found their measure of ruin. View quote
Roger Kahn
The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon. View quote
Roger Kahn
At carefree times in early boyhood I chose to believe that life was a kind of ball game, but with a mix of years and perception I learned better. View quote
Roger Kahn
There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons. View quote
Roger Kahn
Newspapers blew on dirty floors. Littering is an ancillary function of the free press. (Roger Kahn)
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. View quote
Roger Kahn
What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game. View quote
Roger Kahn
The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat. View quote
Roger Kahn
It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent. View quote
Roger Kahn
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. View quote
Roger Kahn
One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all. View quote
Roger Kahn
Nouns and verbs carry writing. View quote
Roger Kahn
No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day. View quote
Roger Kahn
One thing a writer has, if he is fortunate, and I have been fortunate, is a partnership with the years. View quote
Roger Kahn
In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a manand who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer. (Roger Kahn)
It was a fine thing to be a newspaperman and I very much wanted to be a good one. View quote
Roger Kahn
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. View quote
Roger Kahn
Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst impression of ourselves. View quote
Roger Kahn
When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home. View quote
Roger Kahn