Jeanne Marie Laskas

“One cheerleader per season per NFL squad is chosen to attend the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. All season long, the cheerleaders speculate about who will be chosen.”

“Contrary to popular mythology, not all NFL cheerleaders are bimbos or strippers or bored pretty girls looking to get rich. The Ben-Gals offer proof. Neither a bimbo nor a stripper nor a bored pretty girl would survive the rigorous life of a Ben-Gal. The Ben-Gals all have jobs or school or both.”

“If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can't fully protect the head from damaging impact.”

“Mike Webster's death was significant. Iron Mike. The best center in the NFL. Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. Four Super Bowl rings. He had played in more games - 220 of them - than any other player in Steelers history.”

“I'm not a sportswriter.”

“Brooding is more something I do when I'm working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We've worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos. Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never though of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything better or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me. Brand new.News.”

“One thing Jim McGreevey wants the world to know: Leading a double life as a gay man trying to appear straight was easy for him to pull off. He was 'good' at it. Not only that - it helped him become a better politician.”

“Ndamukong started out playing soccer, like his sister before him. She excelled at it, played for Mississippi State, made the Cameroon national team.”

“In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere.”

“People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska's North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho.”

“'Bad Boys', which Bay made when he was just twenty-eight, having never made a movie before, having done a string of commercials and music videos with artists ranging from Donny Osmond to Meat Loaf, grossed more than $140 million worldwide.”

“No matter what your age, gender, politics, nationality, social or financial standing, every single person inhabiting the planet Earth has the same reaction to him: 'Holy crap, Buzz Aldrin, you went to the moon!'”

“Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.”

“Football is in a guy's DNA. A primal thing. You should play it so you can talk about the glory days when you get older and drink Bud with the guys from the office. Get it done when you're young, while you have the chance.”

“The LeBron 11, for $200, has hyperposite construction - a combination of Foamposite material and performance synthetics - and a new layer of Lunarlon cushioning; and anyway, Nike generates about $300 million off the sneakers.”

“The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can't keep it from sloshing around. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull.”

“It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.”

“The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, serves 5 million people in seventy-eight California cities, one of six landfills operated by the Sanitation Districts of L.A. County.”

“Neither Neil Armstrong nor Michael Collins had a mental breakdown after returning from the moon.”

“Every vice president since Mondale has lived up on this hill, on the twelve-acre campus of the Naval Observatory in Northwest Washington. It's a pretty house with a wraparound porch and a white turret.”