Ball Quotations

I love the feel of hitting the ball hard, the pleasure of a rally. It is these things that make tennis the delightful game that it is.

Whoever has played tennis knows the court is pretty big and you always have space to put the ball in.

You can't gaze in the crystal ball and see the future. What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.

The fellows that I played with encouraged me to bunt and beat the ball out. I was anxious to make good and did as I was told. When I came to Brooklyn, I adopted an altogether different style of hitting. I stood flat-footed at the plate and slugged. That was my natural style.

I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game?

Ask any successful person to look back over the events of his or her life, and chances are there'll be a turning point of one kind or another. It doesn't matter if that success has come on a ball field or in a boardroom, in a research laboratory or on a campaign trail - it can usually be traced to some pivotal moment.

It's such an advantage to be able to hit short irons low on command. When it's windy, you'll hit more greens. But low shots are a great strategy in calm conditions, too: The less time the ball hangs in the air, the less time it has to stray off line from the flagstick.

I learned mime back when I was in college, at Ball State University, Indiana. That woke up my body from the neck down and made me realize that acting and communication - portraying a story, event, or emotion - is a full-body experience.

I have no physical genius about me. I can't dribble a ball and run at the same time, I can't do lay-ups - I'm not an athlete. But my experience as a kid was, I was made fun of so much that what I did then, is, I wouldn't participate. And I think I cheated myself out of a lot of fun.

I am a ball player in the summer and a farmer in the winter time, and I aim to be a success at both professions.

But the moment I've got a ball at my feet, I'm happy.

Colorful garments - ball gowns, kimonos, evening pajamas - made from yards upon yards of iridescent silk or velvet. I own an unjustifiable number of such outfits and jump at the chance to wear them. Against the etiquette about which I am otherwise all too conscious, I frequently, and unrepentantly, overdress for the occasion.

On the tennis court, one needs a cool temperament, tremendous ball sense, reflexes, speed, hand-eye co-ordination, power, timing and peak physical fitness. Off the court, the player and support team need skills in planning, execution, travel, an ability to raise funds when needed, and several other talents.

Sometimes I have to shut off the omnipresent disco ball and flashing lights that are always in my head. It's a part of maturing, I guess - just learning that it's not just always about a quick, easy fix of getting people to dance.

I am an arm hitter. When you snap the bat with your wrists just as you meet the ball, you give the bat tremendous speed for a few inches of its course. The speed with which the bat meets the ball is the thing that counts.

I think college prepared me at a really high level. High school, you can take some plays off on the defensive end. Not on purpose, but if your man gets tired, you can rest a little bit. But once you get to college, and especially in the NBA, you can't do that. Even if my man gives the ball up, I'm on help side, helping my team out.

All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.

Ball teams do not always run true to form in a short series. In a season's campaign, class will tell; the best team will invariably win, unless disaster overtakes it. In a short series, some freak situation, same unusual play, may prove to be the turning point.

No one hit home runs the way Babe did. They were something special. They were like homing pigeons. The ball would leave the bat, pause briefly, suddenly gain its bearings, then take off for the stands.

Rushing the ball is all about ball control. If you run the ball, you control the clock. If you control the clock, you usually control the game.

It's fun to get a message on the phone service that Lucille Ball or Burt Reynolds called, and play it very blase by asking, 'Anyone else?'

Because of the grass and open face, I take one more club for shots from the rough, unless the ball is sitting on top of dry grass. Then, I use more loft and swing softer, trying to hit it about 70 percent to avoid a flyer over the green.

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.

Sammy Sosa? Everybody knew who Sammy was, paid attention to Sammy. I had already signed in pro ball when he had the great homer year with Mark McGwire in '98. But I followed it, and I was proud of him because he was my countryman. There are a lot of great ballplayers from the Dominican, and he's one of the best.

It just tickles me still when you see Roger Clemens, as great as he is, throw a split-finger and the hitter just swings and misses. They don't see that ball that well. Jack Morris threw an awful good one and Mike Scott -- there's a lot of great pitchers over the years that I think that pitch definitely helped their career.

I am very fortunate I can send my kids to private school, but everybody does not have the money. If you cannot get your kid in a good school today, your kids are going to be behind the eight ball.

In 1997, I was working with Greg Wilson of Red Ball Tiger, our ad agency at the time, when he came up with an addition to the famous slogan 'I guarantee it' that I was known for saying.

If I would be happy, I would be a very bad ball player. With me, when I get mad, it puts energy in my body.

I loved being a redhead! I always wanted to try it. I was obsessed with Lucille Ball growing up. I really wanted to try it but I always thought that doing it would ruin my hair.

The metaphor I've used is... somebody's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon, and I won't be there to catch them. And that breaks my heart. But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall. So, I can curl up in a ball and cry, or I can get to work on the nets.

I spend the entire 90 minutes looking for space on the pitch. I'm always between the opposition's two holding midfielders and thinking, 'The defence is here, so I get the ball and I go there to where the space is.'

I usually stick out my hand and hope he puts the ball in it. Except the one time I went out to take Early Wynn out. I stuck out my hand and he hit me right in the stomach with the ball.

My life has really been about writing, though some think it's all about once having been in a ball dress and having an odd life and marrying all the time. But it's the writing that's always been the point.

You can't swing with hesitation; you can't try to steer the ball to the flag; you can't worry about that water hazard as you take the club back. You have to pick the right club, visualize the shot you want to hit, and then focus on that shot until the ball is gone.

I'm not a person or a selfish player, but we have to move the ball more, and we have to look further the team game, because we have enough talent to use different players.

I only tend to think of the week ahead, to keep my eye on the ball and question whether a full stop is in the right place. It's easy to get distracted by the wrong things. If you start thinking of grand gestures, it's going to be a lot of hot air. You have to be logical. The theatre is a very logical place.

When I was a kid in Michigan, I used to play ball with a town team on Sunday. Of course, I'd go to church first. Played the church organ, as a matter of fact.

I like big thinkers who, no matter how big their vision, can sit down and talk to me about hour-to-hour, day-to-day type stuff they do to move the ball forward.

The only thing I won't watch is darts. And I don't watch cricket. How can you like a game that requires you to take four days off work to follow a Test? And I don't really like golf. I know a lot of English footballers play, but I know that if I go with the club to play, sooner or later I will end up trying to smash the ball with my foot.

I usually have a few coins in my pocket when I'm playing, but the one I use to mark my ball on the green is a special silver coin that my wife designed for me. It has our wedding date inscribed on it.

Creating a character and living truthfully through her is a whole different ball game. It's all part of the same person but it's a much newer medium for me.

The biggest threat to McDonald's lies within - and that is us as a company becoming complacent. There are a lot of companies that get fat, dumb and happy and take their eye off the ball and forget about serving customers.

I don't plan on writing biographies of great sports stars who are still playing ball. But I did write one on Jackie Robinson, who was playing ball in the 20th century.

I love Courtney Lee. He's a very good player. I know that sounds very simple, but it's true. He does things well. He's a good defender, a great team defender, and he shoots the ball very well.

We put suffocation warnings on all the - on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10.

If the president of the college had asked me what I thought about Dewey McLean, I'd say he's a weak sister. I thought he'd been knocked out of the ball game and had just disappeared, because nobody invites him to conferences anymore.

We're not running the ball again until we get ahead. Shula was calling the plays, but I told them, 'I don't care what he calls. We're throwing every pass from now until we get the lead.' To Shula's credit, he always gave me that option.

Tennis players need to be very focused and very intense, and I can show tennis players are not just hitting the little yellow ball and moving in between the white lines. I'm always trying to show my personality outside of the court.

After a month or so in St. Louis, we were looking around desperately for a way to draw a few people into the ball park, it being perfectly clear by that time that the ball club wasn't going to do it unaided.

I thought I understood the story very well, because I've lived with it for so long. But movies change and take on a life of their own once they start to be made, and you have to keep your eye on the real ball, not the ball that's in your head.

Hit the ball pretty solid. Haven't played a lot of golf this year, so was really unsure of what it would be like. I've been playing pretty well lately, especially hitting the ball solid.

Ball caps travel far and wide. They do far more than keep the sun out of your eyes or the cold off your head. Ball caps are a statement.

It's that way all the way down the line. I've got a boy coaching college ball and another son coaching high school. All the way down to summer leagues, all the way down to kids who are 14 years old. All those teams have a closer.

When I turned 11, my dad decorated a room at the Standard hotel in Los Angeles in a '60s, Austin Powers style. There was human bowling: You run inside a giant inflatable ball and try to knock down pins. To this day, adults say it was one of the craziest parties they've ever been to.

I didn't learn how to swing a golf club until late in my career. And even though I won all those tournaments, I still struggled with consistency, and I relied on my strengths, which were hitting the ball long and high, and I could chip and putt with the best of 'em.

Big waves are a whole different ball game. You're riding a wave with an immense amount of speed and power, generally over 10 meters. On the face of the wave, obviously life and death thoughts start to happen.

I think cricket is there in Usain Bolt's blood. Since I got to watch from close quarters, it was amazing to see him run up to bowl. The perfect delivery stride is understandable because he is a world champion athlete. But the manner - he loaded at the crease and then bowled the ball - left me zapped. He looked like a natural cricketer.

It's a whole other ball game and I am glad that I fit into that space where, whatever it is that you want to do and you are doing as long as you are happy with it, then you know What the Heck!

The cast clubs were a big part of it, too. I found I wasn't getting that instant feedback I was used to with a forged blade. The sweet spot is a shade bigger, and when I didn't hit the ball dead center, I didn't know it, because it still felt great.

There's always going to be a ball up in the air, and what I try to do is make sure that ball is never the kids. If that means sacrificing a social event or having fewer work commitments, it's worth it.

In baseball, you can do something poorly and still get credit. A pitcher could throw a bad ball, the batter hit a screaming line drive, and an outfielder make a fantastic diving catch. Yet, when you look at historical databases, 80% of the time when a ball is struck with that trajectory and velocity, it is a hit.

I always loved hitting a low fade to a back-right pin with the wind howling from the right. Not many guys could get it close in that situation, because they kept it low by just putting the ball back in their stance. You see, playing the ball back turns you into a one-trick pony - you can only hit hooks.

I was an avid tomboy, and as long as I could ride my bike just as fast, hit the ball just as hard, and catch just as many garter snakes, I was accepted as one of the boys and enjoyed all the perks of superiority.

I often felt as a player in a 4-4-2, you end up being outnumbered in midfield and chasing the ball, so as a manager I liked wingbacks to push forward; it gives the midfield player on the ball three or four options.

We took our eye off the ball as a company.

I was a fashion editor for years in London before I came to 'Vogue,' and I spent my life arranging the folds of a ball gown skirt for a picture and pinning fabric and using all those stylist tricks. And you don't have to do that now because they can do it in Photoshop.

The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Here or There as strikes the Player goes.

After a pretty amazing year that included more wins than I thought possible, I rang in 2013 by watching the Times Square ball drop on TV... and then heading directly to bed. It might not have been the typical New Year's Eve for a 21-year-old, but what can I say? It was a training night!

Whether it be personal or musical, I just think I'm a walking art piece, just a ball of creativity.

Outside the golf course, I feel the pressure, and I feel what everybody else is feeling. But on the golf course, it's just the golf ball and clubs. And when I have that, it just puts a lot of pressure off of me. It just makes me very calm looking at it, yeah.

The game itself, I think, plays into the strength of my game, which has always been tee to green, hitting the ball consistently in play and managing my game. Putting has always been the one thing that's been a bit more erratic.

The players have competed on the level the last 25 or 30 years are always going to be the players that compete at a high level. These guys practice hard, they work on their game, they still hit the ball extremely well.

What I do find enormously gratifying is the reviews my books get from the American press. They are so on the ball compared to anywhere else. It's so satisfying to get a review that conveys the reader understood precisely what I was trying to get at.

You just don't want to get pigeon-holed into one position. That's why even though I start out at center, I may play small forward, if I get a rebound and you're not there I can bring the ball up.

When I was a kid, I used to try and hit every ball out of the ground. After playing one-day cricket and Test cricket, I never thought I'd get a chance to play like that again, ever. Twenty20 has given me the opportunity of playing like a kid again. I can just feel free and go out there and hit.

Ball position is everything in iron play. If you aren't careful about it, you can create some major problems in your game just by getting an inch or two off.

A bowler is his own captain. I know what needs to be done, what the ball is doing. If you don't know where you are going to bowl and where you think the batsman will hit, then how can you tell the captain what you want? You are the judge.

There is no doubt that someone who tries to throw a curve or pitch at any early age before he's developed, before his hand is big enough to grip the ball correctly, will damage his arm.

Any time you play in a USGA Championship, if you don't drive the ball on the fairway, you're dead. You're done.

There is a definite loneliness in the game. Most people stay away from you since they think they're intruding upon your time. And after the ball game, when it's 11 o'clock and you want to eat dinner some place, the restaurants are closed.

I do not play golf regularly, but I feel that hitting the moving ball in cricket is tougher than hitting a stationary ball as in golf, which requires more concentration and steady hands.

To flight approach shots lower with the scoring clubs - what I consider my 7-iron through wedges - I stand two or three inches closer to the ball than normal.

My grandpa was the one; he started taking up golf when I was about two and introduced me to the game as far as just taking me to the driving range where I grew up playing. That was really all he had to do was let me hit a golf ball and kind of fell in love with it from there. He didn't really have to teach me a whole lot or anything.

Barack Obama is not Harry Truman, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan to stop World War II. Barack Obama is not John F. Kennedy, who lowered marginal tax rates to get economic growth and job creation. Barack Obama and the far left, they are a completely different ball of wax.

Some players like to change clubs around the green to hit high or low shots. I play all of my short-game shots with my 54-degree sand wedge and change my ball position to hit it higher or lower. I think it's easier to learn one club than four.

I was a contact hitter my whole career but I learned how to handle the ball inside. And Ted Williams played a big part in that. He gave me the advice on how to handle inside pitches.

It often seemed like we had become a nation where the only heroes were rock singers and ball players and that there were no large men of probity who could be called upon for the task.

Men can be men and still get excited about other men kicking a ball around and they're never mocked, whereas it's easy for women to take mocking on board, to be belittled. Because we're used to it.

You know I used to sit there and I'd go outside and play ball and everything, but now in my free time I just kind of lay back and relax because this atmosphere is so busy and stressful, so anytime I can sleep, you'd best believe I'm sleepin'.

Anyone who has played the game professionally, you're always taught that the ball is the most important, most precious thing, so when the ball hits the ground, it's always a mad scramble. It's amazing how many times there is a fumble, and the person who recovers it initially doesn't walk away with the ball.

Do you agree that when there's tension and an obsession to want to hit the ball is when you hit it worst? You have to be loose.

The medium of response in America is fame; that's how a person that bounces a ball can make millions of dollars, and a school teacher with no fame makes $35,000.

I don't play ball because I want attention. I do it because it gives me the opportunity to bust somebody's head. And I just love to do it. I love what I do.

What a ball from Frank. Frank and I go back years. He used to do that when I was at Ajax.

I was born to score goals, I feel. How I score them - how I get the ball into the back of the net - might have changed. The actual ability of what I was born to do will never leave me.

My first years on tour, I tried to be super professional by considering the yardages to every feature and hazard. Over time my caddie and I noticed I play better when we keep it simple. Think about the distance you want the ball to fly, and only that number.

Dungy, head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, has long believed that he, his staff and players should be as devoted to family time as they are to playing time, as focused on giving to charities as they are to taking the ball away from opponents.

I don't believe in luck. Not in golf, anyway. There are good bounces and bad bounces, sure, but the ball is round and so is the hole. If you find yourself in a position where you hope for luck to pull you through, you're in serious trouble.

I will fall in love with any golf course that you have to drive the ball straight. You understand what I'm saying? That's my advantage. My advantage wasn't putting. In fact, I wasn't even a great putter or a good putter.

If my skin is feeling a little dry, I use La Mer face cream. I also love their Eye Concentrate. It goes on with this little metal ball thing that's very refreshing.