“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”
“NFL owners should quit worrying about silly things like players celebrating in the end zone. They should give them something to really celebrate. Get rid of the artificial surfaces.”
“People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.”
“Every time a football player goes to ply his trade he's got to play from the ground up -- from the soles of his feet right up to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads. That's OK You've got to be smart to be number one in any business. But more importantly, you've got to play with your heart, with every fiber of your body. If you're lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he's never going to come off the field second.”
“There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance -- physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its ''national pastime'' pedestal in less than fifteen years.”