I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks.
It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.
The way to be successful is through preparation. It doesn't just happen. You don't wake up one day and discover you're a lawyer any more than you wake up as a pro football player. It takes time.
In doing your work in the great world, it is a safe plan to follow a rule I once heard on the football field: Don't flinch, don't fall; hit the line hard.
Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.
To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who hits the line hard.
It's named the Lombardi Trophy for a reason, because we play and live in Titledown. We've got the best fans, and I can't wait to go home and see those fans and bring home the Lombardi Trophy.
Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers, which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject. So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn't expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.