“Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.”

I’d noticed him watching me for a year or so, especially when we’d play games where there was running or jumping.

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.

If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard. The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.

I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.

He was constantly on me about the job that I was to do and the responsibility that I had upon the campus. And how I must be able to carry myself because people were looking.

When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.

I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn’t a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.

The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.

I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn’t in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I’d learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.

Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.

One chance is all you need.

If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.

It’s like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.

Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.

Football, that’s just athletics. But in the business world – doing everything – people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town.

With the NBA’s dress code, I had to revamp my wardrobe a little bit. They call it ‘business casual.’ You have to wear dress jeans or dress slacks, with a collared shirt or sweater. And you can’t wear athletic shoes.

I always said I wanted to be a great athlete, ever since I was an overweight little kid. I just love competing in any kind of athletics.

There’s no other heavyweight in the division like me, especially when it comes into the athletic department. I’m the most athletic heavyweight in the division.

The game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics. It furnishes amusement to the thousands and thousands.

Athletics keeps us healthy, gets us up and running around. It also gives you an opportunity to meet a lot of different people, which is very important.

It takes tremendous will to compete in any athletic endeavor, so it meant going to bed early and getting my homework done in advance. I had to sacrifice things, like a social life, to be a skater at 15. But I loved skating so much that it was worth everything to me.

Every sport evolves. Every sport gets bigger and more athletic, and you have to keep up.