Steve Rushin
Journalist
1966-09-22
Quotes by Steve Rushin
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Sam Snead had perhaps the most stylish solution to the balding golfer: A snappy fedora that became his signature style, so much so that many never knew he was tonsorially bereft.
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What's certain is that ranking powerful people is inherently self-defeating. For starters, true potentates know who they are without being told, and they have no need to announce it.
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Humans had run barefoot for millennia, and some still preferred doing so in the modern Stone Age of the mid-20th century, when the handful of people running for exercise often wore whatever they happened to have on at the moment of inspiration.
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As good as NFL Films is at making players human, it's even better at making players superhuman. No Hollywood studio has made movies that are more grand or gorgeous. Every meticulous shot of 'Hard Knocks' is a vision: every slow-motion spiral, every shaved head steaming like a Manhattan manhole cover.
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The most enduring Top 10 ever written wasn't written at all, but chiseled onto stone tablets and conveyed down Mount Sinai by Moses, who introduced to the world not just a set of Biblical precepts but also a new format for starting arguments: the list of 10 things.
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Years ago, children helped my brother search for his lost ball at Jackson Park Golf Course in Chicago - and even offered to sell it back to him on the next tee. That entrepreneurial spirit, on the site of the 1893 World's Fair - which introduced Cracker Jacks to the United States - exemplifies America, to say nothing of American public golf.
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Baseball consists of a million threads of dullness, on a loom of ennui, woven into a tapestry of tedium.
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I remember seeing Letterman do stand-up on 'The Tonight Show.' Or, it's probably more accurate to say, I remember hearing him do stand-up, because the Carson show existed mainly as sound leaking under my bedroom door at night. I'd hear Johnny telling jokes and my dad laughing at them.
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Quitting has always been the worst possible thing you can do in sports. It's downright un-American.
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Occasionally, Americans in large numbers are moved by a vanquished athlete's grief. Larry Bird with a towel over his head in 1979 comes immediately to mind. But more often, sports fans do the opposite - they delight in the desolation of a defeated archrival.
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In 1972, there was still a New York City law prohibiting women there from 'furnishing refreshments to the audience or spectators at any place of public amusement.' That's right: Until the law was repealed in 1977, it was technically illegal for women to work as popcorn vendors in Madison Square Garden.
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Putting is so difficult, so universally vexing, that the best the pros can do is tell us how to miss. 'Miss it on the pro side,' they say, meaning miss it above the hole. I can't even do that consistently. I miss it on the pro side. I miss it on the amateur side. I miss it on both sides of the clown's mouth.
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In golf, a wedge issue means just that: You can't hit your sand wedge, or your lob wedge needs to be regrooved. In politics, a wedge issue is more serious still: It's one that splits the electorate, dividing voters along ideological fault lines.
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Everything gleamed or glinted on TV in the '70s, from the 'flavor crystals' in Folgers coffee to the yellow dentures dipped in Polident and instantly restored to pristine, piano-key whiteness.
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After the abrupt death of my mother, Jane, on Sept. 5, 1991, of a disease called amyloidosis, my dad took up golf at 57. He and my mother had always played tennis - a couples' game of mixed doubles and tennis bracelets and Love-Love. But in mourning, Dad turned Job-like to golf, a game of frustration and golf widows and solitary hours on the range.
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History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.
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