Quotes about Tennis

Opening and closing of Chapter 9 Tennis On The Titanic

During the Gore/Bush/Nader presidential election, while the entire nation was hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vidsion.  I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while the passengers and crew concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck.

In our election-obsessed culture, everything else going on in the world - war, hunger, official brutality, sickness, the violence of everyday life for huge numbers of people - is swept out of the way while the media covers every volley of the candidates.  Thus, the superficial crowds out the meaningful, and this is very useful for those who do not want citizens to look beyond the surface of the system.  Hidden by the contest of the candidates are the real issues of race, class, war, and peace, which the public is not supposed to think about.
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The ferocity of the contest for the presidency in recent elections conceals the agreement between both parties on fundamentals.  The evidence for this statement lies in eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration, whose major legislative accomplishments - destroying welfare, imposing more punitive sentences on criminals, increasing Pentagon spending - were part of the Republican agenda.

The Demacrats and the Republicans do not dispute the continued corporate control of the economy.  Neither party endorses free national healthcare, proposes extensive low-cost housing, demands a minimum income for all Americans, or supports a truly progressive income tax to diminish the huge gap between rich and poor.  Both support the death penalty and growth of prisons.  Both believe in a large military establishment, in land mines and nuclear weapons and the cruel use of sanctions against the people of Cuba.

Perhaps when, after the next election, the furor dies down over who really won the tennis match and we get over our anger at the referee's calls and the final, disputed score, we will finally break the hypnotic spell of the game and look around.  We may then think about whether the ship is slowly going down and whether there are enough lifeboats and what we should do about all that.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

A good follow-through is just as important in management as it is in bowling, tennis, or golf. Follow-through is the bridge between good planning and good results

Business is a lot like a game of tennis - those who serve well usually end up winning

We miss you dear Carol O'Day We're with you in this all the way Though cancer's a menace We need you for tennis Heal quickly then come back and play.

Tennis has always been a big challenge to me and to be able to play that kind of tennis - well, only tennis can produce these feelings for me.

By the way, what a polite game tennis is. The chief word in it seems to be "sorry" and admiration of each other's play crosses the net as frequently as the ball.

In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye and a body ready to put itself into all postures; so in the mathematics, that use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended.

Upon gaining a wildcard bid to the US Open Tennis Championships: That's great - I'm only seven wins away from my first grand slam title.

I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would be if you ironed it out. I thought it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table. I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain. An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square." That is napkin-sized, about ten inches by ten inches. Scientific American magazine in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimate of 1 1/2 square metres; that's a square of brain forty inches on each side, getting close to the card-table estimate.' A psychologist at the University of Toronto figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't seen his living room), but the prize winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would cover a tennis court. 'How can there be such disagreement?' How can so many experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't know, but I'm on the hunt for an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a football field. A Canadian football field.

If you are worshipping false gods-such as football, baseball, gold, tennis, or money or technology or automobiles or houses or gold or silver-and you can tell what a man worships by what he does on Sunday-repent and start worshipping the true and living God, the maker of heaven and earth and all things that in them are.

As for me, tough duty though it may be, I continue to do my part for the commercial recreation industry. Fishing, boating, tennis, golf, running, hunting, and all of this. Horseshoes. It's tough duty. Somebody has to do it, and I'm going to keep on.

Let no one say that I have said nothing new . . . the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.

Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.