Sport’s Quote of the Day
[Guest post by DRJ]
Texas football Coach Mack Brown, as he prepares to visit the troops with Ohio State’s Jim Tressel, Mississippi’s Houston Nutt, Wake Forest’s Jim Grobe, UCLA’s Rick Neuheisel, the Air Force Academy’s Troy Calhoun and former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville:
“[In the military,] you never know when you leave in the morning if you are going to come back or if you are going to come back in the same way, so their lives are very different than ours. And as many similarities as there are between football and the military, theirs is real because they can die. And that’s the difference, and that’s why we quit using the term “war” and we quit using the word “battle” when we start talking about a football game because it’s very, very different. But leadership is something we can continue to learn.”
— DRJ
i have a friend who’s a lawyer, but who was an 11B in a previous life with the 10th Mountain in Mogadishu….. he says it’s all he can do to restrain himself when some twit starts using battle terminology in regards to going to court.
redc1c4 (fb8750) — 5/27/2009 @ 4:40 pmI have developed a real fascination for college football in the World War II years, and have been reading a number of books about that era. One thing that strikes me in particular is how many college football players who went off to war then came home to resume their football careers would say how they never could again accept that analogy of football as war.
Then again, some coaches like Woody Hayes who served in WWII continued to talk about football using the terminology of war, so I guess not everyone was so affected.
JVW (fdc303) — 5/27/2009 @ 5:10 pmWoody Hayes, I liked … a lot. My boss played for him.
JD (acaf96) — 5/27/2009 @ 7:59 pmI grew up three blocks from Woody and he had a deep appreciation for our military. He also was a devout student of military history and I really admire his behind the scene charity work he did. He was an over the top personality who, sadly, will be chiefly remembered for his fiery outbursts on the gridiron.
FLBuckeye (83b827) — 5/27/2009 @ 8:01 pmAsk his former players how they feel about him