Dick Schaap Quotes

"Also, I am driven by a wonderful muse called alimony."

"In fifty years of covering the sport, of course Muhammad Ali is by far the dominant figure."

"Some people who love boxing might love Mike Tyson, but people outside of the sport are generally repulsed by him and therefore, repulsed by the sport."

"I did not choose necessarily on the basis of significance, ... If you have a vote for the most significant athlete, then you have Ali, then you have Babe Ruth, then you have Michael Jordan. They changed the face of sports. But I voted purely on what I considered to be athletic ability, and if I had anything in the back of my mind it was, 'If you put these guys on a field and they played each other in 20 sports, who would win the most?' I think Jim Brown would win the most, and I think Chamberlain would be awfully close."

"I did not choose necessarily on the basis of significance. If you have a vote for the most significant athlete, then you have Ali, then you have Babe Ruth, then you have Michael Jordan."

"I hate repetition and I love challenges, and that is why I've jumped from newspapers to magazines to books to television to radio to public speaking."

"I worked with Rocky Graziano and Rocky was certainly a character."

"Sugar Ray and talked about doing some articles together or writing a book together but dealing with Sugar Ray was a lot like fighting him. He would fake you in and then he'd drop you."

"Today, it's money. There's no question about that. Unless you endorse a grill that cooks hamburgers and steaks, where else can you make the kind of money that you can make in the ring if you're good?"

"I think anybody is entitled to vote for whomever they want, and I think Secretariat does qualify as an athlete,"

"Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose."

"I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days."

"I think on balance, Don King has been bad for boxing. I think he's done some very good things and I think he did a heck of a job of promoting Ali but I think I could have promoted Ali."

"It's kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases it's for the lack of a suitable hero."

"My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down."

"There is never going to be another Ali."

"All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism."

"I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader."

"If I got paid, it was no more than five dollars a column, and I still think I was overpaid."

"My top three were Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain and Bo Jackson."