Sports Narrative Quotes

I was never the big leaper, the dunker, the long and athletic kid who looked the part of a traditional basketball star. Truth be told, I wasn't even considered a top guard coming out of my recruiting class.

I was one of those guys who wasn't supposed to make it in this league.

Broadcasting golf is not like broadcasting baseball or football. You see the ball and the action through your own eyes. The story is unfolding in front of you. In golf, the story is unfolding here and there and everywhere. As the guy in the broadcast tower, you're getting it all on screens and from reporters in the field. It's a tricky business.

It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.

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.

When I got hurt, I wanted to develop my skills from a storytelling perspective, do the work, read books. Develop things. To be the storyteller for basketball, period.

We always tell everyone that women's wrestling has always been told through the lens of a man because it's a male-dominated industry. It's never been told through the lens of a woman and we want to be able to tell that story.

If I can get a story about a player, I would give you a ship load of numbers, batting averages and all just for that one precious story. That's the kind of thing that I love to do.

I've played more park games than NBA games, and I had a 10-year NBA career.

Basketball games - and seasons - make great narratives; they feature distinct acts, heroes and villains, and guaranteed resolutions.

Sportswriters are what make sports great and fun to watch.

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

I remember when we were making 'They Call It Pro Football,' which was our 'Citizen Kane.' The first line is 'It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.'

I'm the first transsexual fighter in MMA. Like, ever. It's always going to be part of the narrative, but I'll deal with it. I'll try my best to use it to my advantage.

I grew up with sports, but I was definitely not good enough to become a professional athlete - I just loved the storytelling aspect of it.

Any time I've taken the mound, it's always been the old Samson-and-Goliath story written about me.

I'm always fascinated by the use of the first-person plural talking about sports.

It is much easier to do a film about something that the audience readily knows about - say, cricket. It is much more difficult to write a film based on golf.

'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.

I was running super slow. Chris thought I was done. Then one day at the end of February, I woke up and my body felt good. I was just so happy. I was faster than my brother again. I got all my moves back. I told him, 'Brother, I'm back, and now you're done!'

I wanted to make a film that wouldn't just appeal to Formula One fans. That's what the great sports documentaries do - 'Hoop Dreams,' 'When We Were Kings' - they're human dramas first, sport second, if at all.

The self-image of many contemporary sportswriters seems to depend on maintaining that were it not for sports, athletes would be pumping gas, if they were not sticking up the gas station.

I've always gotten credit for being a big man who doesn't want to shoot threes. Throughout my entire basketball career prior to coming to the NBA, I was praised for doing that.

Fans watching need to be able to connect the dots in your match and the story that you're trying to tell.

NPR allowed me to treat sports seriously, as another branch on the tree of culture.