Halas, George

Chicago Bears founder/owner/coach

 One of my principles was always to do anything that was to the benefit of the league, and that was the case with all of the other teams, too. They were not selfish. They did not think just in terms of, "What's good for me?" They thought in terms of the league, and that's one of the reasons why the league has been so successful, why the game has grown into the greatest sport in the country.

 What a great game pro football is! Oh, they talk a lot about overexposure on TV, but that I don't believe in. Football is not like the theater, where the same people play the same characters day in and day out, sometimes over a period of years, and still manage to put on an acceptable play. In football you have the added advantage of players playing different roles from week to week, playing different characters, you might say. In every game they're in different scenes. And that's the reason people will never get tired of this game.

 Find out what the other team wants to do. Then take it away from them.
[explaining his theory of defense]

 Nothing is work unless you'd rather be doing something else.

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Halberstam, David

Author

 It [baseball] is the sport that a foreigner is least likely to take to. You have to grow up playing it, you have to accept the lore of the bubble gum card, and believe that if the answer to the Mays-Mantle-Snider question is found, then the universe will be a simpler and more ordered place.

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Hall, Donald

Poet and baseball fan

 Baseball connects American males with each other, not only through bleacher friendships and neighbor loyalties, not only through barroom fights, but most importantly through generations. When you are small you may not discuss politics or union dues or profit margins with your father's cigar-smoking friends when your father has gone out for a six-pack; but you may discuss baseball. It is all you have in common, because your father's friend does not wish to discuss the Assistant Principal or Alice Bisbee Morgan. About the season's moment you know as much as he does; both of you may shake your heads over Lefty's wildness or the rookie who was called out last Saturday when he tried to steal home with two out in the ninth inning down by one.

 Players age, and baseball changes, as veterans slide off by jet to Japan instead of buses to Spokane. Baseball changes, and we wish it never to change. Yet we know that inside the ball, be it horsehide or cowhide, the universe remains unaltered. Even if the moguls, twenty years from now, manage to move the game indoors and schedule twelve months a year, the seasons will remain implicit, like the lives of the players.

 Baseball sets off the meaning of life precisely because it is pure of meaning. As the ripples in the sand, in the Kyoto garden, organize and formalize the dust which is dust, so the diamonds and rituals of baseball create an elegant, trivial, enchanted grid on which our suffering, shapeless, sinful day leans for the momentary grace of order.

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Hall, Glenn

NHL goalie

 I like the people, the talk, even the dinners. I love everything about hockey except the games.

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Hamilton, Brutus

Track coach

 What fun is it? Why all that hard, exhausting work? Where does it get you? Where's the good of it? It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life that those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest.

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Hansell, Ellen

Tennis player

 We did, now and then, grip our overdraped voluminous skirt with our left hand to give us a bit more "limb" freedom when dashing to make a swift, snappy stroke, every bit as well placed as today, but lacking the force and great strength of the modern girl.

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Hardy, Arthur W.

Player with the Topeka Giants, a barnstorming black baseball team

 We played baseball every day. We started in Topeka and we played up through Kansas, Iowa, and into Illinois and Chicago. And we played back in those little country towns. Now that was a very interesting experience. We carried eight players and three pitchers. I pitched today; tomorrow I'd be on the gate; the day after that would be my rest day, or maybe I'd play in the outfield.

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Hargrove, Mike

Major league player and manager

 I never knew anybody who said they liked doubleheaders except Ernie Banks, and I think he was lying.

(See also Ernie Banks)

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Harper's Weekly

 That game of football, which we are happy to say is not yet extinct, ought to be a matter of as much concern as the Greek or mathematical prize. Indeed, of the two it is the more useful exercise. Here the English are vastly our superiors. . . . We had rather chronicle a great boat-race at Harvard or Yale, or a cricket match with the United States Eleven than all the prize poems or the orations on Lafayette that are produced in half a century.
[in 1857]

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Hayes, Woody

College football coach

 Statistics always remind me of the fellow who drowned in a river where the average depth was only three feet.

 The minute I think I'm getting mellow, I'm retiring. Who ever heard of a mellow winner?

 I don't apologize for anything. When I make a mistake, I take the blame and go on from there. I just despise to lose, and that has taken a man of mediocre ability and made a pretty good coach out of him.

 I don't live in the past. I'm a student of the past, and I try to learn from the past, although some people will say, 'You haven't done a very good job of it.' But for me to live in the past? Hell, no.

 We respected one another so damn much. Now that doesn't mean I didn't get so mad at him that I wanted to kick him in the, uh, groin.

 You don't get hurt running straight ahead. . . three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense. I will pound you and pound you until you quit.

 I'm not trying to win a popularity poll. I'm trying to win football games. I don't like nice people. I like tough, honest people.

 Eliminate the mistakes and you'll never lose a game. To eliminate mistakes, you have to pick the right quarterback.

 I love football. I think it is the most wonderful game in the world and I despise to lose.

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Heisman, John

College football coach

 Gentlemen, it is better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.

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Higdon, Hal

Author and runner

 The difference between the mile and the marathon is the difference between burning your fingers with a match and being slowly roasted over hot coals.

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Hillary, Sir Edmund

Mountaineer

 Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.

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Hill, Art

Author

 With those who don't give a damn about baseball I can only sympathize. I do not resent them. I am even willing to concede that many of them are physically clean, good to their mothers and in favor of world peace. But while the game is on, I can't think of anything to say to them.

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Hill, Calvin

Yale and Dallas Cowboy running back

 If a kid has nothing else going for him except a jump shot, and that's the thing that distinguishes him and gets him pats on the back, and there's nobody else counteracting that, encouraging him to go to school, all the other negative reinforcers are too much. Because he'll practice that jump shot to the neglect of the rest of his life. I've seen guys from my old neighborhood who had great jump shots and even now, twenty or thirty years later, that jump shot is all they have.

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Hinkle, Clarke

Hall of Fame fullback

 We had no pain-killers in those days. Nothing. You lived with pain. I don't think there was ever a ballgame that most of us didn't live with pain. But you were so wrought-up playing the game that you didn't think about it. Outside of getting a little rest now and then, the one and only time I ever left a game was when Bronko Nagurski put seven stitches in my face. They took me down to the emergency room of the hospital and put the stitches in, and they brought me back in a taxicab and I went back into the ballgame.

 It annoys me very much when I hear anyone say that we "contributed" a lot to pro football. Heaven's sake! We established the game. . . But we're not included in the pension plan, and I don't think there'll ever be a time that we will be. We established the type of game that the players and owners are making their money on today, but they couldn't care less about us.

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Holman, Nat

Pioneer basketball player and coach

 I'd quit coaching before I'd teach a one-hand shot to win a game. Nobody can convince me a shot that is more a prayer than a shot is the proper way to play the game.
[in 1936]

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Holtz, Lou

College football coach

 Frank Leahy was here [Notre Dame] for three years and went to war. I think sometimes that would be a welcome relief to get away from the pressures.

 In the successful organization, no detail is too small to escape close attention.

 I have a lifetime contract. That means I can't be fired during the third quarter if we're ahead and moving the ball.

 We have a lot of success with a dumb person calling plays. I'm hesitant to have a smart one call them.
[Explaining why he, rather than the quarterback, called his team's plays]

 I don't mind starting the season with a bunch of unknowns. I just don't like finishing a season with a bunch of them.

 There isn't anything wrong with winning ugly. As a matter of fact, there isn't anything wrong with being ugly - as long as you're successful.

 How you respond to the challenge in the second half will determine what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser.

 Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

 If you're bored with life--you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things--you don't have enough goals.

 I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

 The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren't in a very good mood.

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Holub, E. J.

AFL/NFL linebacker

 My knees look like they lost a knife fight with a midget.
[After his twelfth knee operation]

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Holyfield, Evander

Heavyweight champion

 A champion shows who he is by what he does when he's tested. When a person gets up and says 'I can still do it', he's a champion.

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Hooper, Harry

Major league outfielder

 You know, I saw it all happen, from beginning to end. But sometimes I still can't believe what I saw: this nineteen-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over, a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since. I saw a man transformed from a human being into something pretty close to a god. If somebody had predicted that back on the Boston Red Sox in 1914, he would have been thrown into a lunatic asylum.
[On Babe Ruth]

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Hornsby, Rogers

Hall of Fame second baseman

 People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

 I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it.

 I don't like to sound egotistical, but every time I stepped up to the plate with a bat in my hands, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the pitcher.

 Any ballplayer than don't sign autographs for little kids ain't an American. He's a Communist.

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Howe, Art

Major league manager

 I'll tell you, I don't know what we ate during the off day, but we better eat more of it.
[after his team hit eight home runs in a game]

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Howie, John

Wheelchair athlete

 When I did this three years ago, it was like death. When I did it last year, it was like near death. This year, it was just really hard.
[after finishing his third 10-kilometer race]

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Hrabosky, Al

Major league relief pitcher

 When I'm on the road, my greatest ambition is to get a standing boo.

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Hubbard, Cal

Hall of Fame football player and umpire

 Being an umpire wasn't such a tough job. You really have to understand only two things and that's maintaining discipline and knowing the rule book.

 Boys, I'm one of those umpires that misses 'em every once in a while so if it's close, you'd better hit it.

 I always hated to throw a guy out of a game but sometimes it was necessary to keep order.

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Huggins, Miller

Hall of Fame manager

 A manager has his cards dealt to him and he must play them.

 A good catcher is the quarterback, the carburetor, the lead dog, the pulse taker, the traffic cop and sometimes a lot of unprintable things, but no team gets very far without one.

 A string of good alibis.
[asked what a player needs to get ouf of a slump]

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Hull, Bobby

Hall of Fame hockey player

 My wife made me a millionaire. Before she divorced me, I had three million.

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Hull, Brett

NHL player

 I'm not dumb enough to be a goalie.

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Hunt, Lamar

Founder of the American Football League

 We had the right product at the right time. We helped make pro football a national game. We opened the gates and the battle caught public imagination.

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Hutchins, Robert M.

University of Chicago president

 By getting rid of football, by presenting the spectacle of a university that can be great without football, the University of Chicago may perform a signal service to higher education throughout the land.
[In his Jan. 12, 1940, announcement that the school was dropping football]

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