Thoughts on { Football | Dmitri Shostakovich / Elbert Hubbard / George Orwell / Eduardo Galeano / J.D. Salinger / Nick Hornby / Albert Camus
Pablo Picasso, Football, 1961
“Football is the ballet of the masses.”
“Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.”
“Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared legally dead. ”
“Football has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
George Orwell, Journalism and Letters, 1903-1950
“Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators.”
Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, 1995
“He was telling her about some pro football game he’d seen that afternoon. He gave her every single goddam play in the whole game–I’m not kidding. He was the most boring guy I ever listened to.”
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
“Please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”
Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, 1992
“I know of morality, it is football that I owe.”
Albert Camus
