Gary Carter Quotes

I love the sport but it's definitely taken a toll on me. The first two years after I retired I was in pain and couldn't even sit in a chair for 2 years. 2 years! You want a sport that takes care of you the way you take care of the sport.

Pain is part of the sport.

Injuries are a huge thing for skating. I think skating is a very unnatural sport for the body, very tough on the joints.

I'm glad that I just played baseball, because I'm sure I had a much longer baseball career than I would've had a football career. I did miss football, but I didn't miss some of the injuries from football.

As a former football player who has carried a football more than 4,000 times, trust me, I did not go into ballroom dancing with my body being 100 percent, with no aches or pains or ailments coming with me. When you're dancing, you're doing stuff that your body's not used to, and so you start to aggravate those old injuries.

For a quarter of a century, I've been playing baseball for pay. It has been pretty good pay, most of the time. The work has been hard, but what of it? It's been risky. I've broken both my legs. I've sprained everything I've got between my ankles and my disposition. I've dislocated my joints and fractured my pride.

I never had a serious injury that kept me out of a big competition. Now everyone has injuries - to their feet or their knees or their backs.

My overwhelming concern will always be the well-being of the athletes. In Olympic sport, it is rare for competitors not to devote half their young life to this. Their families will have given up all sorts of things to allow them to do that.

The thing I don't miss is waking up in the morning, hurting, the grind of the game.

You love the game, but it's hard to do the things you do when you're feeling like you're a leg down all the time, literally. Or you're always beat up, even coming into the season. So it's just not as fun when you're down, and you got to work your way up. And you can't really get there because you're so beat up.

I've played with sprained ankles before, bruises, stuff like that.

When you train as hard as we do, bad things happen sometimes. It's just part of the sport.

Football players have always got a problem, some pain, and in some games, I have had small problems with my knee or some pain, and I played anyway, but people don't know if I have a problem or not. People just know if you score a goal or if you play badly, but they never know if you are well or not.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could be playing regularly and saying they do not have a niggle. It is the nature of the beast, what you get when you play a lot of rugby: you have to get another niggle to forget about the one you already have.

Of course every fighter, whether they admit it or not, they have aches and pains and they go into fights hurt.

It's so uncommon for athletes to push themselves the way they do and not have injuries as a result.

You imagine running 120 miles a week, week in, week out, for the past four or five years. It takes a little bit out of you.

My dad has kind of been the standard for me, he played 16 years in the league, and since I've been in the league, every year that I go through and deal with the scratches, the bumps and bruises, just the grind that it is to go through one NBA season.

My toenails are out of my foot because of all the stamps I have received during games. But it's fine. This is the Premier League and the way they play here.

You do get injuries in this sport. More than in other sports.

I think all volleyball players are playing with some type of shoulder injury. You use it so much.

I would have liked to have played more but injuries are part and parcel of football and you've got to shoulder it, got to take it on and get on with it.

People think I'm soft and bailed out on basketball. But it was five knee surgeries.

I played soccer my whole life. I'm kind of a heavier person, and whenever you kick and punt, no matter how limited an activity it is, my brain and shoulders are going to be OK because I didn't play a tough guy position, but my knees took a lot of wear and tear from the kicking.

Injuries are horrible for every player.