Skip Bayless Quotes

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.

I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.

The Blood of Heroes is surely the best account to date, one that presents plenty of new insights while acting as a corrective-or at least an alternative viewpoint-to previous accounts....Donovan combines that vital blend of authoritative scholarship with the vivid writing necessary to make an oft-told tale seem fresh.

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

My real heroes have always been sportswriters.

I'm a huge sports guy, so getting messages from guys I grew up watching and following - Scott Van Pelt, Chris Paul, Charles Barkley, Adam Schefter - was really special.

I'm not a sportswriter.

I'm not sure sports writing is an art.

A sportswriter is entombed in a prolonged boyhood.

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'm a huge sports fan but have no interest in minutiae. I don't remember who won Super Bowls five years ago or listen to sports talk radio.

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.

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.

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

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!

I'm a big watcher of sports, consumer of sports content, so I love documentaries; I love the format.

If I hadn't have been good enough at football, I'd have been a sports journalist - which is what I do now anyway. Or a cricketer. I might have been a cricketer.

I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words.

There'd be days I was in the locker room with my dad doing media, and there'd be other days that I'd be with my mom in the press box and just kind of looking at stuff from that point of view. I'd see guys writing stories after the game and stuff like that. So it was cool to me to see both sides.

I work for the BBC now. I do it because I genuinely love football.

What the people say on TV means nothing to me, and it means nothing to anybody that's actually playing football. It's for the fans to watch and enjoy.

I love sport, so I'd love to do more stories if I can that deal with sport maybe. Other characters, actually the real guy is so interesting why would you want to get anyone to play them?

Every person working in sports journalism today owes a tremendous debt to Howard Cosell. His greatest contribution was elevating sports reporting out of daily play-by-play and placing it in the larger context of society.

Someone wanted me to write a profile for ESPN about the commissioner of baseball, and I said, "He's just some suit! Some Republican. No!" I mean if you want me to write about baseball, boxing or football, I'll write about those things because I watch them, I think about them a lot and I like them. But I don't want to write about Barry Bonds.

For years I wrote newspaper columns mostly about the teams in my city. There was no cheering in the press box, and I fought to remain objective.