Steve Rushin Quotes

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Steve Rushin

Profession : Journalist

Birth : September 22, 1966

Growing up in Bloomington, Minn., I loved the ritual of dressing for Little League - in white socks, blue stirrups, belted pants, a double-knit jersey, and the cap I'd hold over my face to screen out mosquitoes in right field.

Steve Rushin

You never forget your first felony. Mine was mail tampering. As a hoops-crazed 13-year-old, I rifled through a new neighbor's mailbox to confirm that the occupant of the split-level on 98 1/2 Street in Bloomington, Minn., really was former Gophers basketball star Flip Saunders.

Steve Rushin

Broadcasters calling a big game are often reminded to let the action breathe. A great moment of a televised game doesn't need any narration, which is why the announcers - the good ones, anyway - shut up at the celebration and let the pictures do the talking.

Steve Rushin

'Uff da,' for the unenlightened, is Norwegian for 'oy vey' and is a common expression in Minnesotese.

Steve Rushin

When people ask if Marquette University is in Michigan, and I tell them my alma mater is in Milwaukee, they sometimes say, 'What's the difference?'

Steve Rushin

I spent a year slaving over a hot rollergrill in a Metrodome concession stand and watched the World Series there - and a Super Bowl and a Final Four. I can honestly say - regardless of outcome - that I left every game floating on air.

Steve Rushin

The Metrodome was built for football. Fans seated down the third-base line at a baseball game faced centerfield, so that they had to turn and look over their right shoulders to see home plate.

Steve Rushin

Yes, sports are very often very boring, which is good and necessary: If games were one long highlight, we wouldn't have any highlights at all.

Steve Rushin

In any other context, 'icing' is a great and exciting word: The proverbial icing on the cake, for instance, is a bonus - a wonderful thing on top of another wonderful thing. But in hockey, icing merely results in the referee's raising his right hand, as if swearing an oath to the deity of downtime.

Steve Rushin

Compassion and empathy are anathema to sports.

Steve Rushin

Occasionally, Americans in large numbers are moved by a vanquished athlete's grief. Larry Bird with a towel over his head in 1979 comes immediately to mind. But more often, sports fans do the opposite - they delight in the desolation of a defeated archrival.

Steve Rushin

Hype covers every surface of mass culture, and sports fans are intimately familiar with it - the heavy-breathing buildup that leads, inevitably, to a first-round knockout or a 30-point blowout or a fourth-inning rainout.

Steve Rushin

Hype is supposed to overpromise and underdeliver, not overpromise and overdeliver. Usually, it doesn't deliver at all - it takes your money and keeps your pizza.

Steve Rushin

The phrase 'NFL combine' always sounds redundant, because the league is a combine harvester, reaping and threshing everything in its path.

Steve Rushin

Hurricane Irene's advance coverage was heavy on worst-case scenarios. Thank goodness they didn't pan out.

Steve Rushin

If you own face paint and a bulb horn and you're not a circus clown, you might be uncool.

Steve Rushin

Sports and fashion move so fast that I can't possibly keep my ear to the ground. For one thing, my ear trumpet gets in the way.

Steve Rushin

Trying to keep up is the ultimate act of uncoolness. And so I still retrieve not one but two daily newspapers from the driveway.

Steve Rushin