In all honesty, once you become a professional, number one, you're no longer a fan. I don't root for the Dodgers, really. I just try to do the game as best I can. And the winning and the losing will take care of itself.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the transition from being a fan to a professional, highlighting the focus on performance rather than allegiance.
Vin Scully expresses that once you reach a professional level in any field, your perspective shifts from being a supporter to a performer. In this context, he reflects on how focusing on doing one's job to the best of one's ability is more important than the outcomes, like winning or losing, which are outside one's control.
In practice
Using this quote in a motivational speech to aspiring professionals in sports or other fields.
The game is just one long conversation, and I'm anticipating that, and I will say things like 'Did you know that?' or 'You're probably wondering why.' I'm really just conversing rather than just doing play-by-play. I never thought of myself as having a style. I don't use key words. And the best thing I do? I shut up.
That really is my trademark. Day to day, week in, week out. If something happens and the crowd roars, I shut up.
Don't let the winds blow your dreams away... or steal your faith in God.
As long as you live keep smiling because it brightens everybody's day.
In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened…
Almost all of us growing up have played baseball on some level. It has an inside track with people. It has a unifying effect.
For life affords no higher pleasure, than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. He that labours in any great or laudable undertaking, has his fatigues first supported by hope, and afterwards rewarded by joy... To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.
My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel a ton of pleasure and very little pain - and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain.
There is no greater glory that can befall a man that what he achieves with the speed of his feet or the strength of his hands.
Nobody has enough talent to live on talent alone. Even when you have talent, a life without work goes nowhere.
Ask me what makes a champion runner, and I will tell you it helps to have the great good sense to choose your parents carefully.
Scoring goals is a great feeling, but the most important thing to me is that the team is successful - it doesn't matter who scores the goals as long as we're winning.
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