Roger Kahn > Quotes

“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didn't really know or like. Men from ghettos we didn't dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. There's nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps.”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“Football is violence and cold weather and college rye. ”
― Roger Kahn

“By applauding Robinson, a man did not feel that he was taking a stand on school integration, or on open housing. But for an instant he had accepted Robinson simply as a hometown ball player. To disregard color, even for an instant, is to step away from the old prejudices, the old hatred. That is not a path on which many double back.”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“Ebbets Field was a narrow cockpit, built of brick and iron and concrete, alongside a steep cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue. Two tiers of grandstand pressed the playing area from three sides, and in thousands of seats fans could hear a ball player’s chatter, notice details of a ball player’s gait and, at a time when television had not yet assaulted illusion with the Zoomar lens, you could see, you could actually see, the actual expression on the actual face of an actual major leaguer as he played. You could know what he was like!”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“Dear Dad: After twenty-two years in the amusement park, this roller coaster isn’t fun any more, so I’m getting off the ride. Roger”
― Roger Kahn, Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events that Shaped a Life

“You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.”
― Roger Kahn

“Baseball writers develop a great attachment for the Brooklyn club if long exposed,”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.”
― Roger Kahn, Good Enough to Dream

“Poor kid, I thought, to do this to yourself at twenty-three and leave a note that tells me you could have been a writer. I would have liked that for you. I would have liked that very much.”
― Roger Kahn, Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events that Shaped a Life

“Pique or policy. We would never know.”
― Roger Kahn, Good Enough to Dream

“Particularly during one’s youth, it is difficult to distinguish trivia from what is worthy.”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“Worse, Roger erupted into outbursts of uncontrollable rage, without apparent cause. In time I learned that this was one symptom of what therapists formerly described as a manic-depressive personality. Now they call the condition bipolar disorder. Roger sometimes telephoned and began the conversation, “You better listen to me, Dad, or you are one dead man.” Then, half an hour later, “Dad, can we go to the Yankee game tonight?” Bipolar disorder is terrifying, perhaps most of all for the person suffering from it.”
― Roger Kahn, Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events that Shaped a Life

“Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed. ”
― Roger Kahn

“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“It is too easy to lay griefs on the end of summer.”
― Roger Kahn

“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man.”
― Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

“It is dangerous to spring to obvious conclusions about baseball or, for that matter, ball players. Baseball is not an obvious game.”
― Roger Kahn

“There were a lot of Americans in Paris and I sparred with a couple, just to be obliging,” Dempsey said. “But there was one fellow I wouldn’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hemingway. He was about twenty-five or so and in good shape, and I was getting so I could read people, or anyway men, pretty well. I had this sense that Hemingway, who really thought he could box, would come out of the corner like a madman. To stop him, I would have to hurt him badly. I didn’t want to do that to Hemingway. That’s why I never sparred with him. “If you write this and you want to hand the people a laugh, tell it like this. Did I duck Harry Wills? Hell, no. They just never offered me a decent purse to fight him. The only man I ever ducked was Ernest Hemingway. I never ducked a fighter, just a writer.”
― Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s