Steve Rushin > Quotes

“He pulled the shade, climbed into bed, thought of the Replacements, a band from his hometown singing about needing a job and needing a girl. Rodney needed both. But he needed the job to get the girl. And he needed ambition to get either.”
― Steve Rushin

“Giving someone shit, Rodney knew was a sign of love in Catholic families. And the same held true for Rodney and his friends. But he wished it weren't Keith's default setting, his auto-reply to everything.”
― Steve Rushin

“Moment, momentum, momentous

If you reduce sports to its smallest discrete units, its subatomic particles, you're left with protons and electrons and neutrons called moments. They're the building blocks of every season, every game, every series of downs. Two or more moments may accrete into something more, a propulsive energy called momentum, which in turn can snowball into something greater still, that which is momentous.
Consider those consecutive moments last Aug. 4 (2012 summer Olympics) in London, when Michael Phelps-in his final Olympic race-caught and then overtook Japan's Takeshi Matsuda on the butterfly leg of the men's 4 x 100 medley relay. Momentum passed to Phelps's U.S. teammate Nathan Adrian, who pulled away on the freestyle leg, sealing a victory that yielded Phelps's 18th gold medal, and 22nd medal overall, more than any other Olympian in history. It was like the conjugation of some Latin verb: moment, momentum, momentous. Or if you prefer: Veni, vidi, vici (we came, we saw, we conquered).
From "moments of the year”
― Steve Rushin

“At home, while Dad is away, Jim beats up Tom, Tom beats up me, and sometimes Jim skips the middleman and beats me up directly.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“At that hour, a shaft of sunlight shone through stained glass. Which is to say, windows whose glass was comprehensively stained—by a double-glazing of nicotine and automotive exhaust, and the secondhand smoke of a half-century of bullshit.”
― Steve Rushin, The Pint Man

“Between screams, Mom managed to cover the snake with a bucket, which she duct-taped to the floor, so that when Dad came home from work eight hours later in a suit and tie he found, in the dark, an enraged reptile—coiled and claustrophobic—waiting to strike. He just managed to slide a copy of the REO Speedwagon album You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“The Sears Christmas Wish Book, thick as a telephone directory, was more than a catalogue of consumer goods. It was a glossy catalogue of children’s dreams, a hard-copy rendering of an eight-year-old’s id.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Elvis and the Babe died on the same day - August 16 - twenty-nine years apart, prompting the minor-league St. Paul Saints to honor both men with a promotion called “Two Dead Fat Guys Night.”
― Steve Rushin, Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into The Soul Of America's Sports

“I am named after the saint who was stoned to death rather than the one who was tortured and beheaded. Reading my ‘Children’s Book of Saints,’ I think of this as a small blessing.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“In dying, she allayed my greatest fear -- of death. Dying joined shoe tying and coat zipping and bed making on the long list of acts Mom demonstrated for her children, so that we could someday do it for ourselves.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Monster trucking - big trucks driving over small cars - reproduce on a grand scale the sound a beer can makes when collapsing against one’s forehead. And is there any sound in life more satisfying than that?”
― Steve Rushin, Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into The Soul Of America's Sports

“I want to - in the words of John Cougar Mellencamp - hold on to sixteen as long as I can. Even though I’m already seventeen and am really holding on to age ten.”
― Steve Rushin, Nights in White Castle

“Childhood disappears down a storm drain. It flows, then trickles, then vanishes, leaving some olfactory memory—of new tennis balls, Sunday-morning bacon, a chemical cloud of Glade—to prove it ever existed. It seldom ends on a sixteenth birthday or an eighteenth birthday or some other calendar date, and rarer still is it stamped with a time of death. But sometimes it is.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“He kept every book he ever read. Until there were just too many, he had them all out on shelves, their spines displayed as trophies, like the taxidermied heads of big game he had bagged.”
― Steve Rushin, The Pint Man

“It would never rain in the Metrodome, a heartbreaking knowledge that eventually broke my spirit.”
― Steve Rushin, The 34-Ton Bat: The Story of Baseball as Told Through Bobbleheads, Cracker Jacks, Jockstraps, Eye Black, and 375 Other Strange and Unforgettable Objects

“Dad looked me in the eye before embarking on any business trip and said, man-to-man, “I’m counting on you to hold down the fort.” Though I may have only been eight years old, I would take the charge seriously and was proud that not once - in all the years my father traveled - did Apaches overrun our two-and-a-half-bath Colonial on 96th Street and shoot my mom full of arrows.”
― Steve Rushin, Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into The Soul Of America's Sports

“At its creation in 1956, the federal interstate highway system was pitched as a speedy way to flee urban centers in the event of an atomic attack. Bostonians still drive as if they are doing just that.”
― Steve Rushin, Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into The Soul Of America's Sports

“There is an irresistible impulse among the boys of suburban Minneapolis to kick a football as far as they possibly can. Even among the men. Mike McCollow’s dad will come home from his dental practice, having stopped at the VFW hall for a brandy Manhattan en route, and drop-kick a half-frozen football between the uprights of two barren tree branches without even setting down his briefcase”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Dad has impressed on each of his children that we’re no better than anybody else and are often a great deal worse.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Beyond that box camera he saw in a shop window in Chicago in seventh grade, Dad has never wanted anything, as far as I know. He still coos over the tennis balls and Old Spice we give him every birthday, Father’s Day, and Christmas. And yet he understands the symbolic power that an earned object holds.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Madman Muntz was a wildly successful automobile salesman who had pioneered the loud television hard sell to move cars off his lot.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“In those days, tired of buying him tennis balls and socks and Old Spice for his birthday, we annually asked Dad if there wasn’t anything else he would like. And he always said the same thing. He gathered us to his side—Amy and The Boys; one redhead and four shitheads—and told us that he already had everything he ever wanted. The car is just a box to keep it in.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“East Coast natives, I’ve discovered, make no distinction between Minnesota and Michigan, between Minneapolis and Indianapolis. The Bloomingtons - in Indiana and Illinois and Minnesota - are all the same.”
― Steve Rushin, Nights in White Castle

“There is no such thing as a carefree childhood, only a childhood that shifts the burden of care onto someone else. [Mom] is that someone else.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“In the spring of 1973, when I was six, researchers at the University of Chicago reported that “young school children at play are similar in a number of ways to young baboons or monkeys,” a fact any boy could have told them.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“A fourth-grader with a red-tipped Lucky Spike dangling from his lip and a die-cast metal cap gun tucked into the waistband of his Toughskins, riding through South Brook on a Sting-Ray the color of grape soda, was an adolescent American badass circa 1974 - especially if he had a temporary tattoo from a Cracker Jack box adhered to one or both of his pipe-cleaner biceps.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons