30+ Thomas Boswell Quotes (Insightful, Engaging And Witty)

Thomas Boswell is an American sports columnist who has been writing for The Washington Post since 1979. He is well known for his in-depth analysis of baseball and other sports, as well as his witty and often humorous writing style. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the J.G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Top 10 Thomas Boswell Quotes

1. More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.
5. 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.
6. Baseball is religion without the mischief.
7. Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.
8. 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.
9. Baseball means Spring's Here. Football means Winter's Coming.
10. 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.

Thomas Boswell Short Quotes

• A major golf tournament is 40,000 sadists watching 144 masochists.
• There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.
• A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.
• When you fall in love with golf, you seldom fall easy. Itʹs obsession at first sight.
• Quarterbacks have to ask the crowd to quiet down. Pitchers never do.

Thomas Boswell Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

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. — Thomas Boswell

Life Lessons by Thomas Boswell

1. Thomas Boswell's work emphasizes the importance of hard work and dedication to one's craft. He also stresses the need for humility and the ability to learn from mistakes. Lastly, he encourages readers to focus on the big picture and to strive for excellence in all aspects of life.