…trying to maintain order during a legalized gang brawl involving 80 toughs with a little whistle, a hanky and a ton of prayer. – A veteran NFL referee describing his duties, quoted in Richard Saul Wurman, Amer

My idea of a good hit is when the victim wakes up on the sidelines with train whistles blowing in his head… I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault. – Jack Tatum, They Call Me Assassin, 1979

The Super Bowl is a kind of corporate Woodstock. – Michael Ruby, Inside Sports, 1981

I quickly learned what many Sunday widows already realized — that football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbal, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time. – Arnold J. Mandell, “A Psychiatric Study of Professional Football,” 1974 [An inte