Jane Leavy Quotes

They should have a rule: in order to be a sportswriter, you have to have played that sport, at some level; high school, college, junior college, somewhere. Or, you should have had to have been around the game for a long time.

Sally Jenkins of the 'Washington Post' is the best sports columnist in the country. Second best is Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN.com, and third is Dan Wetzel on Yahoo!

Writing was far more of an art in the sports world than it is now.

Sports journalism is in the midst of an identity crisis so profound that we no longer know whether we're made up of one word or two.

I have been a sports fan my whole life. To be able to talk about sports in an intelligent, journalistic fashion and to do things of a serious nature is a dream job.

Believe it or not, I worked four summers in college as a sports writer covering baseball for a parks and rec department in Bayonne, N.J.

I told another ESPN friend here, I love all sports. I can't think of any I don't love. I've even come to appreciate cricket. Maybe I could play a sportswriter. I don't know. Anything in the sports realm is appealing.

And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events.

I wanted to be a sportswriter because I loved sports and I could not hit the curve ball, the jump shot, or the opposing ball carrier.

My dad was a sports writer when I was younger and then he became just a general columnist. But I grew up with him literally getting into brawls with football coaches.

There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did.

A lot of people don't realize that I started my career in sports and was a sports reporter long before I was on television. I used to be an NBA reporter and an NHL reporter.

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.

I would love to be associated with some sports organization. I was a journalism major. That's kind of intriguing, to do something in the political-commentary arena.

At times during high school and college I wished to be a sportswriter.

As anyone who has read 'Sports Illustrated's Steve Rushin knows, it's quite possible to write an unreadable column without being a TV pundit. But if you want to be a consistently good columnist, you can't be on television.

There's discussion in athletics about how sport - where they say 'SportsCenter' has ruined the fundamentals of basketball because it's - it only applauds dunks and three point shots and blocks, and I think, you know, the cable news has done the same thing for politics.

By the time I was 8 years old, sports had pretty much taken over my life.

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

In the glory days of Orioles, when I was a newbie baseball writer for the Post, the roster of talkers was as good as the everyday lineup. Singy - Ken Singleton - Flanny, and Cakes - the underwear spokesman Jim Palmer - were my go-to guys, occupying stalls along one wall of the shabby chic clubhouse.

I love sports. So if I was like a sports anchor or something like that. I would love to do that.

It was easy being healthy when I was young. I was full of energy, so sports and physical challenges were fun. But as I got older and the spring left my step, exercise became harder, and eating, drinking and watching TV became easier. By the time I was 50, I'd put on 50 pounds.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.