Love Quote by Bill Veeck

Veeck turns self-mythology into a middle finger at respectability. He leads with “love,” but the sentence that follows makes it clear this isn’t Hallmark devotion; it’s the kind of love that justifies obsession, risk, and a lifetime of being underestimated. The setup is vaudeville-dark: “one leg,” “can’t hear or see.” He’s stacking physical deficits like punchlines, daring you to pity him. Then he snaps the frame: even this broken-down “old-timer” can “live like a king” inside baseball. The wit works because it flips the usual capitalist script. A businessman is supposed to talk in margins, market share, legacy. Veeck talks like a fan who somehow got the keys to the stadium.

The subtext is a defense of joy as a serious motive. Veeck, famous for promotions that treated the ballpark like a civic party, is arguing that the sports world is one of the few industries where passion can be an alibi for power. He’s not apologizing for privilege; he’s mocking the idea that privilege needs a nobler justification than doing what you can’t stop doing.

Context matters: Veeck owned teams, battled baseball’s stuffier owners, and carried a war injury that literally made him an “old-timer with one leg.” This line is both autobiography and provocation. It says: I paid in body, I paid in ridicule, and I still got the best seat in the house. The kingly life, he implies, isn’t money. It’s proximity to the game, the permission to play on a national stage.