Willie Mays Quotes

My father was a really good athlete, so his pop-ups really were sky high. Eventually I learned how to judge them properly and catch them well. It was great training for when I started to play on teams, which I did all through school.

My desires are simply I love to teach, I love to be in uniform, I love to throw batting practice, I love to be with the kids.

I won't be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of six and sixteen wearing a glove and swinging a bat.

If this validates anything, it's that learning how to bunt and hit and run and turning two is more important than knowing where to find the little red light at the dug out camera.

In the summertime, I played Little League baseball; football in the fall; basketball in the winter.

At 19, I was still figuring out how to throw a fastball.

The American boy starts swinging the bat about as soon as he can lift one.

In baseball you train the whole body, except for the hip and eyes.

If you look at any superior athlete, you will find a strong parental influence. Parents introduce their children to a sport, and then they support them.

The young athlete who aspires to greatness, generally speaking, learns a number of things from several different coaches. The first one taught him the fundamentals; the second one instilled discipline in him and taught him more of the techniques that must be mastered to excel.

Today's Little Leaguers, and there are millions of them each year, pick up how to hit and throw and field just by watching games on TV. By the time they're out of high school, the good ones are almost ready to play professional ball.

Kids don't learn the fundamentals of baseball at the games anymore.

I started taekwondo at 5 or 6 years old and did a bunch of kick-boxing later, too. Eventually I became a black belt and coached as well. I did some basketball and softball growing up, but most of my activity was martial arts.

My dad was my first coach and drove me extremely hard from a very young age.

There are great amateur bodies that have good programs right from the grassroots level to professionals.

Baseball began early for me. When I was 5, my father took two Little League bats and put them on a lathe. He whittled them down and sanded the bats so they were the proper size for my brother and me. He began by throwing tennis balls to us. Eventually, we practiced hitting and fielding at a field near our house.

I've been boxing since I was 7 years old.

All of us at some point have been coached by a male cricketer. I strongly believe that they get a lot of intensity into the training sessions. They are very hard taskmasters.

One of my favorite things to do is teach kids to shoot a basketball. When they finally get it and their eyes light up, it's the greatest feeling.

I often speak about tennis being one of the most important sports when I was growing up, for my hand-eye coordination and quick feet.

Not after all the time my dad spent teaching me to switch-hit.

You could have a kid that is going to get in trouble a little bit, and you can teach them as much as you can, and hopefully they'll go the right way.

Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.

If I say to my daughter, "Go say 'hi' to Aunt Gertrude," there is a reason there. I'm teaching her manners. I think the idea that she'll say 'hi' to Aunt Gertrude only if she wants to is the biggest crock of silliness I've ever heard. Yet I meet people everyday who were clearly brought up to think that if they didn't want to say "hi" to Aunt Gertrude, that was fine.

That's what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for.