Commercialization of Sports Quotes

Personalities seem in many cases to dominate the lucrative endorsement market. But that doesn't upset me. What upsets me is when not enough attention is paid to the product-the game.

It is a game before a product, a sport before a market, a show before a business.

Don't quote me on this, but if they ever manage to ban beer advertising in baseball you can kiss the national pastime goodbye.

There are ... other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.

Baseball, like some other sports, poses as a sacred institution dedicated to the public good, but it is actually a big, selfish business with a ruthlessness that many big businesses would never think of displaying.

Football is becoming all about money. I would like to be in a lift with Gordon Brown and say, 'Please do something about football.'

Modern sport can be an ugly convergence of commerce and celebrity, but it still has the capacity to move a crowd.

The thing that concerns me the most is when I hear that people are making a lot of money a lot of ways except for the athletes, whether it's on the bowl games, the TV contracts, the conferences, the schools, the coaches, however you want to say it.

Someone who doesn't make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn't act like he'd just become king of the world, either. Athletes in my day were simply humble in our victory. I believe we were more mature then...Maybe it's because the media puts so much pressure on athletes; maybe it's also the money. In my day we competed for the love of the sport...In my day we patted the guy who beat us on the back, wished him well, and that was it.