Athletic Determination Quotes

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Experiencing pain in your muscles and aching, that's what makes the muscle grow. and that divides one from being a champion and one from not being a champion. If you can go through this pain barrier, you may get to be a champion. If You can't go through it, forget it.

Experiencing this pain in my muscles and aching and going on and on is my challenge. The last three or four reps is what makes the muscles grow. This area of pain divides a champion from someone who is not a champion. That's what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they'll go through the pain no matter what happens. I have no fear of fainting. I do squats until I fall over and pass out. So what? It's not going to kill me. I wake up five minutes later and I'm OK. A lot of other athletes are afraid of this. So they don't pass out. They don't go on.

I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.

You look at Ray Lewis, you look at Brett Favre. I know it's different positions, but you think about the mental mindset it takes to continue to grind and play at a high level. Those are the guys that I look at that motivate me.

I gave it everything in the last 20 minutes. I knew that I still had the energy, that I was ahead of the mark. I felt euphoric — it was the last 20 minutes of my sporting career.

I'm fighting against becoming soft. That's the worst thing you can say to a basketball player.

I'm not involved in tennis but committed.

When I played ball, I didn't play for fun. . . . It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a contest and everything that implies, a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.

We're in Madison Square Garden, I can't let you beat me in Madison Square Garden, are you serious!?

I will talk about Baker Mayfield. I like everything about his makeup. I like how his teammates really rally behind him. I like his eyes downfield. I like his accuracy with his deep throws. I like how he shows that fighter's spirit; when it comes time to come back, he's fighting through to come back, and I applaud those things.

I still think I have the speed and the variations also to win the matches, but its very good competition and also a great challenge for me too.

When I'm healthy, I can still pitch. I know I can still pitch at that level and get the results that I want.

At least 80 percent of the success of the football team is determined by the fight and spirit that they put into their play.

We talk about toughness as a quarterback: it's not sometimes the physical part that you see; it's the mental toughness and the 'I'm going to stand in here, take this shot,' and 'I'm going to deliver it to my guy.'

When my legs hurt, I say: “Shut up legs! Do what I tell you to do!

Michael, to me, he was an assassin. He was one of those guys that prepared himself extremely well and was relentless in his attacking. And there are a few guys who have that mentality. I think Kobe Bryant has that type of mentality, and LeBron has that type of mentality.

I knew unless I got stopped I was going to go all the way. I don't know if I can run any faster. I just ran as fast as I could.

Obviously, I didn't get looked at and didn't get recruited by Fresno State or any other school in the nation, to be honest. It has always been my goal to go into every game and show you why you should have recruited me, why you should have offered me.

The night before my amputation, my former basketball coach brought me a magazine with an article on an amputee who ran in the New York Marathon. It was then I decided to meet this new challenge head on and not only overcome my disability, but conquer it in such a way that I could never look back and say it disabled me.

The obvious goals were there- State Champion, NCAA Champion, Olympic Champion. To get there I had to set an everyday goal which was to push myself to exhaustion or, in other words, to work so hard in practice that someone would have to carry me off the mat.

I'm not really worried about my numbers now as a 36-year-old. I'm not trying to be the first, experimental case of a 36-year-older trying to maintain his numbers, especially when I'm on a team like this. Can I do the same stuff I could do when I was Amare's age? Of course not. I'm not going to even try. However, I feel that I'm the baddest 36-year-old out there.

I love cycling. I am going to keep racing as hard as I can until this body doesn't allow me to any more.

I was sure after the accident when in hospital in Hungary that I was not in the position not to lose any races.

Every time I stepped on the field, I believed my team was going to walk off the winner, somehow, someway.