Featured Athlete Quotes

Unfortunately, we don't have all that many good examples to follow. The people that our cultures label as "successful" are the ones who have become wealthy or famous or celebrities, but the truly successful people--those who have become happy and who are living happy, loving, giving lives--aren't often featured in our newspapers or newscasts. We see the politicians and the criminals and the athletes and the entertainment "stars," but we don't see the people who can truly inspire us to be happy by being just who we are.

Many girls at school were infatuated with his shallow athletic splendor and his golden handsome features that were biologically inherited and had nothing to do with the kind of person he might actually be.

Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening but flat-out wrong. Although Bartelby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturd's three member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue and Maxim covers above captions, “You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers to reveal a disturbing truth: You could have thighs like that and still walk. She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition, and there wasn't a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact that you'd only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces.

Again I see him, leaning back in one of the luxurious chairs with which his room was furnished. I see his indolent, athletic figure; his pale, sharp, clean-shaven features; his curly black hair; his strong, unscrupulous mouth. And again I feel the clear beam of his wonderful eye, cold and luminous as a star, shining

What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America circa 2014 features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood—run, leap, throw, tackle—into a corporatized form of simulated combat? That a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning, and the undisputed champ of our colossal Athletic Industrial Complex?

Agon includes games that have competition as their main feature, such as most sports and athletic events;

This is the true athlete—the person in rigorous training against false impressions. Remain firm, you who suffer, don’t be kidnapped by your impressions! The struggle is great, the task divine—to gain mastery, freedom, happiness, and tranquility.” —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.18.27–28

Nervousness from earlier surged back into me. Goodness. He was honey poured over an athletic body. Short, sandy-blond curls outlined his face, which boasted full lips, high cheek bones, and long lashes that any woman would envy. Even with those soft features, his face appeared hard and sculpted by an artist.

competition as their main feature, such as most sports and athletic events; alea is the class that includes all games of chance, from dice to bingo; ilinx, or vertigo, is the name he gives to activities that alter consciousness by scrambling ordinary perception, such as riding a merry-go-round or skydiving; and mimicry is the group of activities in which alternative realities are created, such as dance, theater, and the arts in general.

In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (population 800), there’s a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once-bustling steel town of Bethlehem. The proprietors have adorned the walls with photographs of other local things that are no more. There’s one of the East Bangor band, a group of about twenty men and boys, in uniform, in front of a bandstand draped with bunting. There’s also one of the Kaysers, a local baseball club, on the day of an exhibition ballgame against the Philadelphia Athletics. These were Connie Mack’s A’s, which team in those early 1930s featured Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, and Lefty Grove. How did a village of under a thousand people manage to have its own band? How did a cluster of slate-belt villages field a regular baseball club, apparently good enough to stay on the same field for nine innings with the Philadelphia Athletics? What

She heard a clip-clop, clip-clop sound coming from around the corner, and suddenly she found herself face to face with one of the massive athletes. It was his wooden sandals that were making the racket. The enormous man was dressed only in a thin silk robe, his long black hair pulled up into a tight topknot. His dark brown eyes shifted to Heather’s face, only for a split second, his puffy features showing no expression whatsoever, and he continued on. It was like watching a barge sail by.

Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.

The current President of the Consistorial Court was a Scot called Hugh MacPhail. He had been elected young. Presidents served for life, and he was only in his forties, so it was to be expected that Father MacPhail would mold the destiny of the Consistorial Court, and thus of the whole Church, for many years to come. He was a dark-featured man, tall and imposing, with a shock of wiry gray hair, and he would have been fat were it not for the brutal discipline he imposed on his body: he drank only water and ate only bread and fruit, and he exercised for an hour daily under the supervision of a trainer of champion athletes. As a result, he was gaunt and lined and restless. His dæmon was a lizard.

The positive psychology field has taught us about the benefits of optimism and happiness. One study correlated the life spans of Major League Baseball players with their smiles. In 2010, researchers Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger analyzed 230 baseball cards from 1952, a time when cards featured athletes looking straight at the camera. The results will make you want to smile. * Players not smiling had an average life span of 72.9 years. * Players partially smiling had an average life span of 75.0 years. * Players with a full smile had an average life span of 79.9 years.

Holden stopped next to the desk and turned around to look at the woman sitting on the couch. Graying hair, but good features and an athletic build. In a flophouse like this, that probably meant a prostitute reaching the end of her shelf life.

Patrick Bergmann was not an awful-looking person—wiry, athletic build, dirty-blond hair in a shaggy cut, regular features—but something about him was not quite right. Beyond his obvious enjoyment of the horrible blood-soaked mess he wallowed in, his eyes were open just a little too wide, and his smirk had an unsettling feeling to it, as if he was posing naked for the first time and liking it. His face was saying, just as clearly as possible, that this was a portrait of the real Him, his Secret Self. This was who he was, somebody who lived to feel the blood run down his blade and crouch in the viscera piled at his feet. I did not need to hear the Passenger chanting, One of Us, One of Us, to know what he was.

Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.

Baby Registry Please give this child a strong stomach, an infectious laugh, an independent spirit. A love of words, numbers, people, and solitude. A fear of poisons, reckless driving, guns—and nothing else. Make him or her contemplative but not to the point of fretfulness. Make him or her generous but not to the point of self-effacement. Let this child inherit Finn’s features, especially his eyes, nose, and mouth. And his trim, athletic limbs. His capable hands. Will-taste-anything tongue. Un-noteworthy feet. Ability to not shower for several days and still smell okay, even good in an earthy way. His musical talent—yes, especially that. Even his resistance to being pinned down, because why settle for anything less than a life full of great adventure? Let this child inherit an enduring faith in the power of secular humanism in a world full of racism, sexism, terrorism, and greed. If you must, my teeth and/or earlobes would be fine.

Peter Flannery had that athlete-gone-to-seed look. His once-golden locks had thinned and fled. His features were malleable. He wore a rayon three-piece suit—I hadn’t seen one in a while—and the vest even had the pocket watch attached to a faux gold chain.

We don’t do superstars in our Tough Mudder world—but if we were to, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Amelia Boone, an athlete who now features regularly on the cover of Runner’s World and who has been the women’s champion at World’s Toughest three times. An in-house lawyer for Apple in Silicon Valley, Amelia is among the only competitors to keep running for twenty-four hours in the desert without a rest. She keeps coming back not for the glory of “winning” but because, she says, “you will never find a race like World’s Toughest Mudder—where you are technically running against other people but where you will still see the leader out there stopping to help people up over walls or out of the water. It is just this unwritten rule; no one questions it, that is how it is.” Amelia studied social anthropology before she became a lawyer, with an interest in the way that social norms and gossip were used by indigenous tribes to create and maintain healthy and coherent cultures. Tough Mudder, she suggests, is the closest she has come to seeing that tribal spirit in action in the contemporary world. “If I am out for a run and I see someone wearing a Tough Mudder headband or T-Shirt, there is always a big smile and a nod of recognition between us,” she says, as if she is speaking of a pair of Yanomami natives coming across each other on a forest trail. It’s a nod, she suggests, that communicates a great many things—not only shared philosophies and kinship but also the recognition that “I may well have pushed your wet ass over a wall at some point last year.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

People tend to extend more trust to individuals who are attractive; studies have proven this. Right now, as I take in Matthew’s athletic body, classic features, and straight white teeth, I wonder how much he has benefited from this advantage.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared Jemima for such a man as stood before her now. Nor her reaction to him that seemed to overtake her whole body. He was tall and broad shouldered, with exquisitely cut clothes moulded to his athletic form. His hair was jet black with no streak of silver, though Jemima could not discern the colour of his eyes in the candlelight. His features were impossibly handsome, chiselled as though by a Greek sculptor.

We’ve featured chefs, professional athletes, TV personalities, Lin-Manuel Miranda,

Judge Winmill stepped in from a door to the right of the bench and climbed to his high-back leather chair. Perhaps an inch over six feet with a slender, athletic build and youthful, boyish features, Winmill was an Idaho native. He grew up in Pingree, a small town in southeast Idaho near the Snake River, and attended college at Idaho State University in Pocatello, where he was student body president. He left the state to attend Harvard Law School but returned to Pocatello to live and practice law. A Mormon, Winmill was the father of four and active in the Democratic Party. He practiced for ten years in Pocatello, until 1987, when Governor Cecil Andrus appointed him to the bench in the Sixth Judicial District of the State of Idaho. Eight years later, in August 1995, he was a Clinton appointee to the federal bench. Breitsameter and Miller told Uhlmann that Idaho prosecutors and the defense bar universally considered Winmill extremely bright and even-handed. He was a judge who labored over his decisions, frequently taking matters under advisement rather than ruling from the bench, and he often conducted his own legal research to ensure the accuracy of his decisions.1

Name: Artemis Landon Class: Runesmith Level: 2 XP: 15/300 Skills: Athletics: D Acrobatics: F Crossbow: C Crafting: D Runesmithing: C Short Swords: F Stealth: F Search: F Healing: D Trapfinding: D Dungeoneering: F Feats: - Trapsenses: Gain a mental warning when about to set off a trap. Class Features: - Runesmithing: By carving intricate runes, you may imbue magic into items and objects. These runes retain all magic until removed or affected by Enchantment Breaking spells. - Runescribbler: Once per day you may use dirt, water or paint to create a temporary rune. This rune functions the same as any other rune, with the exception that it lasts only for one hour regardless of type. Runes: Harden: Supernaturally hardens an item, toughening it against all elements. Shield: Creates a force of magical energy that prevents one type of damage from applying. Requires a damage type rune in order to be functional. Force: Adds a kinetic damage modifier.

Name: Artemis Landon Class: Runesmith Level: 3 XP: 40/750 Skills: Athletics: D Appraisal: F Acrobatics: F Crossbow: C Crafting: D Runesmithing: C Short Swords: F Stealth: F Search: F Healing: D Trapfinding: B Dungeoneering: D Feats: - Trapsenses: Gain a mental warning when about to set off a trap. - Roguish Intentions: Increases your Trapfinding skill to Rank B Class Features: - Runesmithing: By carving intricate runes, you may imbue magic into items and objects. These runes retain all magic until removed or affected by Enchantment Breaking spells. - Runescribbler: Once per day you may use dirt, water or paint to create a temporary rune. This rune functions the same as any other rune, with the exception that it lasts only for one hour regardless of type. Runes: Harden: Supernaturally hardens an item, toughening it against all elements. Shield: Creates a force of magical energy that prevents one type of damage from applying. Requires a damage type rune in order to be functional. Force: Adds a kinetic damage modifier. Boost: Increases a single skill by 1 rank. Does not grant skill if wielder does not have it.

began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.

J.D. Steelritter, like many older adults, is kind of a bigot. Mark Nechtr, like most young people in this awkward age, is NOT. But his aracism derives, he'd admit, from reasons that are totally self-interested. If all blacks are great dancers and athletes, and all Orientals are smart and identical and industrious, and all Jews are great makers of money and literature, wielders of a clout born of cohesion, and all Latins great lovers and stiletto-wielders and slippers-past-borders—well then gee, what does that make all plain old American WASPs? What one great feature, for the racist, brings us whitebreads together under the solid roof of stereotype? Nothing. A nameless faceless Great White Male. Racism seems to Mark a kind of weird masochism. A way to make us feel utterly and pointlessly alone. Unidentified. More than Sternberg hates being embodied, more than D.L. hates premodern realism, Mark hates to believe he is Alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian meta-fiction affects him. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor. It's the end of the long, long, long race you're watching, but at the end you fail to see who won, so entranced are you with the exhausted beauty of the runners' faces as they cross the taped line to totter in agonized circles, hands on hips, bent.

Arrogance: that featured among Philip's colleagues, too, though that was more a matter of mien than anything else. If there was one subject about which they tended to be cavalier, it was the ease of doing anything in life besides physics. They were quick to let you know that, in addition to practicing that best and most worthy of all the sciences, they were, as Philip said about himself, "intrinsically multidisciplinary": they'd casually mention that they'd just cycled their first century, or were doing a show with a local band, or were nearly finished with building a kiln. It was as if the stereotype of the physicist as a bespectacled dweeb was something they felt it was their duty and obligation to strive against. And though they never seemed to be quite as skilled at their extracurricular activities as their pride in them might have indicated, if they were perhaps unlikely to play in professional orchestras or chalk up record-beating times in marathons, then it was even more unlikely that top-level violinists and athletes were doing science on the side, as a hobby. Rebecca was never sure whether there was something about physics as an occupation that made it a magnet for the arrogant, or whether the process of becoming acclimated to the culture of physics involved developing a certain conceit about oneself if one was to succeed, but either way she got the impression that arrogance was often a benefit to physicists, rather than a liability.