“Five years ago my friend José Torres told me that Cus D'Amato had found a trou­bled 14-year-old kid from Brooklyn who is going to become the heavyweight champion of the world”

“Toward the end, he thought perhaps that he had the perfect heavyweight at last in young Michael Tyson: "I have no doubt he'll be a champion. But more than that, he might be a great fighter”

"Don’t get me wrong: The Knicks deserved their championship as the Celtics deserved theirs. But I did feel it was time someone said a word for Wilt."

"More than any other contemporary African-American athlete, his ability to thrive in the pressure cooker of corporate America, while never making any embarrass­ing 'I’m not black, I’m universal' comments or selling his soul rather than just his visage, makes him a role model"

"In America, people sometimes hope New York will die before the close of the century. And so the spectre of another Yankee Frankenstein rising from the ash of urban blight is enough to turn stom­achs from Shawnee Mission to Walla Walla"

“New Yorkers don't easily accept ball­players. They almost always come from somewhere else, itinerants and mercenar­ies, and most of them are rejected. Those who are accepted seem to have been part of New York forever. Hernandez is one of them”

"By playing majestic ball and with some front office high­handedness, this Yankees team resembles the pin-striped aristocracy of old"

“The return of the Yankees to the World Series parallels the astonishing changes in the city in the past few years. One thing is very clear: this is a very good time to be in New York.”

“Though Tyson lacks Muhammad Ali’s inspired narcissism… for all his reserve, his odd, even eerie combination of shyness and aggression, his is a wonderfully marketable image.”

“I cannot go out a loser, Jack Johnson went out a loser. Sugar Ray went out a loser. Joe Louis went out a loser… I got to be that black man who gets out on top.”