Thomas Boswell Quotations

Time begins on Opening Day . . . (when) we know that something fine, almost wonderful, is about to (happen).

The PGA Tour will wish it had an entrenched June date here rather than a tacky fling with FedEx in Memphis.

A Major golf tournament is 40,000 sadists watching 144 masochists.

If you can't beat Europe and you can't beat the Best-of-the-Rest, what's left? A mixed scramble against Tibet?

A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.

Of the big four, the PGA is the most fair and the least fun. Basically, it's just the US Open set up by nice, rather than nasty, fellows.

A major golf tournament is 40,000 sadists watching 144 masochists.

As every golfer knows, no one ever lost his mind over one shot. It is rather the gradual process of shot after shot watching your score go to tatters - knowing that you have found a different way to bogey each hole.

The best place to catch a baseball hit by (Mark) McGwire is definitely not within the confines of the playing field, or sometimes even the ballpark. Other players dial '1' for long distance. McGwire has to ask for an international operator.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.

Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.

Terrorism drives out all normal human activity before it, defining life in its own sick terms, if it can. So, a baseball game on a sultry Texas night before a huge crowd, with everyone feeling perfectly safe, is exactly what terrorists hate. Which is why it is so important to resume such athletic rituals - which symbolize stability, confidence and order - as soon as is reasonably possible.

When you fall in love with golf, you seldom fall easy. Itʹs obsession at first sight.

At its best, the US Open demands straight drives, crisp iron shots, brilliant chipping and putting, and strategic position play. Plus the patience of St. Francis and the will of Patton. At its worst, the Open eradicates the difference in ability between a Tom Purtzer and a Tom Watson and throws both in the same jail of high rough and high risk shots. This is the disturbing tendency in the Opens of the seventies and eighties, one which worries everyone in golf.

I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.

Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers who have polished their malarkey and winnowed their wisdom for years.

Quarterbacks have to ask the crowd to quiet down. Pitchers never do.

Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

Any person claiming to be a baseball fan who does not also claim to have invented the quickest, simplest and most complete method of keeping score probably is a fraud.

Baseball is religion without the mischief.

An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.

All baseball fans can be divided into two groups: those who come to batting practice and the others. Only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.

Cheating is baseball's oldest profession. No other game is so rich in skullduggery, so suited to it or so proud of it.

Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it's beginning to seem that way. We're reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life. Take your pick.

Some things cannont possibly happen, because they are both too improbable and too perfect. The U.S. hockey team cannot beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics. Jack Nicklaus cannot shoot 65 to win the Masters at age forty-six. Nothing else comes immediately to mind.

Baseball means Spring's Here. Football means Winter's Coming.

I think baseball is a great support to people who have emotional voids, gaps, emotional difficulties. That is to say: all of us. Those parts of us that don’t function well. Those parts of us that are sad or depressed—not every day. They can really use baseball. It isn't just the child in a wheelchair or the shut-in senior citizen listening to the radio that needs the game. There’s part of us, part of everybody who’s a baseball fan, who needs the game at that level.

When life is suddenly more serious more of the time, there is also more need for it to be fun at least some of the time. That's why my family will be at a college football game this weekend. We need it. And deserve it, too. Not like a New York fireman deserves it. Or a medic at the Pentagon. But enough.

In and of itself, sports may be trivial, but as a symbol of the American way of life, it has enormous weight. We are seen, worldwide, as an enormously competitive, enthusiastic people who work as hard as we play and play as hard as we work. When baseball - which has traditionally canceled one day of games for huge national celebrations or disasters - stops play for six days, that has reverberations in the national consciousness.

Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.

There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.

Baseball is really two sports -- the summer game and the autumn game. One is the leisurely pastime of our national mythology. The other is not so gentle.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.