Athletic Artistry Quotes

Dancers are both athletes and artists.

Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words.

Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life.

What we accepted as great art - whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony - is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

Ballet's image of perfection is fashioned amid a milieu of wracked bodies, fevered imaginations, Balkan intrigue and sulfurous hatreds where anything is likely, and dancers know it.

Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater.

It's like a puzzle or a painting or music. When I ski, it's like a song. I can hear the rhythm in my head, and when I start to ski that rhythm and I start to really link my turns together, all of a sudden there's so much flow and power that I just can't help but feel amazing. That's where the joy comes from.

If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.

Hockey is an art. It requires speed, precision, and strength like other sports, but it also demands an extraordinary intelligence to develop a logical sequence of movements, a technique which is smooth, graceful and in rhythm with the rest of the game.

I wasn't artistic in drawing or painting, but I think I am artistic in sport. I think I'm always looking for the ultimate, the maximum. It's a challenge that excites me.

I'm an athlete. I'm a performer. Why the hell did I never think of combining the two?

Here's what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn't deserve any art.

Zidane is unique. The ball flows with him. He is more like a dancer than a football player.

I tell you, the arts - and especially ballet - the discipline is extraordinary. I was extremely impressed.

Wrestling is more of a creative outlet, and especially for somebody like me, I view it as my creative outlet. Not all WWE superstars and not all wrestlers view it that way, but that's how I view it, and that's one of the ways my mind works creatively.

I'm just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.

When you see the body outside of a costume and see the strength that it takes, people would look at dance a different way and see how athletic it is. You're not just born like that.

The greatest footballers take the sport into the world of art, of performance.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.