Rick Reilly Quotes

Golf is a hard game to figure. One day you will go out and slice it and shank it, hit into all the traps and miss every green. The next day you go out and, for no reason at all, you really stink.

The great Jack Nicklaus summed things up neatly during a charity match on the Old Course at St. Andrews where he and I were playing against Ben Crenshaw and Glen Campbell. I asked him what he considered to be the most important factor to overcome in the game of golf. His reply, "It's an unfair game."

Golf is the only game I know of that actually becomes harder the longer you play it.

Actors are very emotional, whereas sports people are used to criticism.

Show me a golfer who doesn't have a mean streak, and I'll show you a weak competitor.

It provides a different type of element and mental strain athletes love. That's what makes the game of golf so special.

If my golf game was a prize fight, they'd stop it.

If there is one thing I have learned during my years as a professional, it is that the only thing constant about golf is its inconstancy.

I've gotten rid of the yips four times but they hang in there. You know those two-foot downhill putts with a break? I'd rather see a rattlesnake.

Tennis is a funny game; unbelievable highs and the lows are just as low.

For sure, with golf it's not a physically demanding sport like tennis. That's what makes tennis great - you combine both things. It's a very mental sport and at the same time can be dramatically physical. But I do admire the mentality of sport more than the physicality because physical performance is much easier to practice than mental performance.

Dr. Parent has been a great influence on my mental game. ZEN GOLF is the best book at connecting golf and the mind together. It's for everyone, it really helps, and you're really going to enjoy it.

Obviously in the world of sports, you go through different ups and downs than in normal life. You might be on top of the world playing or you're sidelined with an injury.

Golf is a game that creates emotions that sometimes cannot be sustained with the club still in one's hand.

There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.

I never prayed that I would make a putt. I prayed that I would react well if I missed.

There is no room on the golf course for anger or self-pity.

I hate to lose. When I was a kid, I used to cry every time I lost a game, up until, like, the 8th grade. I used to go ballistic.

Baseball reveals character; golf exposes it.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

If the game shakes me or breaks me, I hope it makes me a better man.

It was probably when I had a game point at 3-1 in the first set and it was a really long point, and I did a passing shot after a huge rally. Maybe from then I was like, 'Okay, that's not normal.'

Golf is assuredly a mystifying game. It would seem that if a person has hit a golf ball correctly a thousand times, he should be able to duplicate the performance at will. But such is certainly not the case.

Men capable of governing empires fail to control a small white ball, which presents no difficulties whetever to others with one ounce more brain than a cuckoo clock. I wish to goodness I knew the man who invented this infernal game. I'd strangle him. But I suppose he's been dead for ages. Still, I could go and jump on his grave.

The game has such a hold on golfers because they compete not only against an opponent, but also against the course, against par, and most surely- against themselves.