Rally Sports Quotes

Sport, on the other hand, is straightforward. In badminton, if you win a rally, you get one point. In volleyball, if you win a rally, you get one point. In tennis, if you win a rally, you get 15 points for the first or second rallies you’ve won in that game, or 10 for the third, with an indeterminate amount assigned to the fourth rally other than the knowledge that the game is won, providing one player is two 10-point (or 15-point) segments clear of his opponent. It’s clear and simple.

we don’t hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. Because violence in the right context is different. We pay good money to watch it in a stadium, we teach our kids to fight back, we feel proud when, in creaky middle age, we manage a dirty hip-check in a weekend basketball game. Our conversations are filled with military metaphors—we rally the troops after our ideas get shot down. Our sports teams’ names celebrate violence—Warriors, Vikings, Lions, Tigers, and Bears.

This is a central point of this book—we don’t hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. Because violence in the right context is different. We pay good money to watch it in a stadium, we teach our kids to fight back, we feel proud when, in creaky middle age, we manage a dirty hip-check in a weekend basketball game. Our conversations are filled with military metaphors—we rally the troops after our ideas get shot down. Our sports teams’ names celebrate violence—Warriors, Vikings, Lions, Tigers, and Bears.

Militaristic rhetoric surfaced at times in PK literature, and despite the organization’s apolitical posture, this rhetoric inevitably found expression in a conservative political agenda. McCartney, for example, rallied the “men of the nation” to “go to war,” reminding them that they had “divine power” as their weapon: “We will not compromise. Whatever truth is at risk, in the schools or legislature, we are going to contend for it. We will win.” For the most part, however, PK speakers preferred sports metaphors to military ones.

In 1925, the central committee of the Soviet Communist party declared that sport should be consciously used "as a means of rallying the broad masses of workers and peasants around the various Party Soviet and Trade Union organizations through which the masses of workers and peasants are to be drawn into social and political activity." Fortunately, people of all nations intuitively tend to resist such exhortations. They know that games remain gloriously pointless and that watching an exciting athletic contest, moreover, can be emotionally almost as exhausting as participation itself—hardly the "passive" experience it is made out to be by the guardians of public health and virtue.

I've missed the opening rituals of a morning pep rally. Darn this school and its constant onslaught of organized student gatherings! I mean, I wouldn't immediately land on "peppy" as an adjective for myself, so how am I supposed to conjure it for a group of people who are only being celebrated because they happen to show a slight advantage in athleticism? So you can take an air-filled shape and put it through another shape--so what? Didn't we get applause for that sort of thing as toddlers? Is this really something we have to cheer for?

the sporting club gave the people of a barrio something to rally behind, a projection of their area and by extension themselves in the wider world.

A second wonder of life is collective effervescence, a term introduced by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his analysis of the emotional core of religion. His phrase speaks to the qualities of such experiences: we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic “we.” Across the twenty-six cultures, people told stories of collective effervescence at weddings, christenings, quinceañeras, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations, sports celebrations, funerals, family reunions, and political rallies, as in this one from Russia:

This coping skill is essentially a protective reaction against threats to the ego. Neuropsychologists have identified the ventral anterior cingulate cortex and the medial orbitofrontal cortex as two areas of the brain that “light up” when a person’s ego has been attacked and he responds not by cowering or playing deaf but instead by rallying in his own defense. This pattern of brain activity is the neurological substrate of bulletin boarding, and bulleting boarding is the salient coping skill of every endurance athlete who achieves greatness despite having the “wrong body” for his or her sport.

Ancient Rome According to legend, the ancient city of Rome was built by Romulus and Remus. They were twin sons of Mars, the god of war. An evil uncle tried to drown the boys in the Tiber River, which runs through present-day Rome. They were rescued by a wolf who raised them as her own. Many years later, Romulus built a city on Palantine, one of the Seven Hills of Rome. The city was named after him. The manager of our hotel suggested we see ancient Rome first. So we hopped on the metro and headed to the Roman Forum. According to my guidebook, this was once the commercial, political, and religious center of ancient Rome. Today, ruins of buildings, arches, and temples are all that are left of ancient Rome. I closed my eyes for a moment, and I could almost hear the shouts of a long-ago political rally. I especially liked the house of the Vestal Virgins. It once had 50 rooms and was attached to the Temple of Vesta. She was the goddess of fire. The nearby Colosseum was originally called the Flavian Amphitheater. It reminded me of a huge sports stadium. Emperor Vespasian began building it in A.D. 72. It had 80 entrances, including 4 just for the emperor and his guests. It had 3 levels of seats with an awning along the top to protect spectators from the sun and rain. It could hold up to 50,000 people!