Love Quote by Alvin Dark

Grace does not arrive as a warm flood; it arrives as a grudging practice, and Alvin Dark admits it with a ballplayer's plainspoken bite. By crediting "The Lord" first, he frames the line as a testimony, then immediately undercuts the piety with a punchline: sportswriters, those minor gods of the daily column, were his final boss. The humor lands because it reverses the expected hierarchy of sins. You'd think the hardest people to love would be enemies, not the men with notebooks. Dark is telling you who really had power in his working life.

The intent is part confession, part clapback. For an athlete of Dark's era (he played in a pre-social-media world where a few beat writers could set the public temperature), sportswriters weren't just critics; they were intermediaries between performance and reputation, and often between a clubhouse and a front office. They could freeze you into a narrative: "slumping", "washed", "selfish", "difficult". Loving them isn't about affection. It's about refusing to let resentment run your days.

The subtext is a professional truth athletes rarely say out loud: the game isn't only played on the field. It's played in print, in the slow drip of interpretation. Dark's line works because it wraps that bitterness in religious language, making the joke safe while keeping the barb sharp. Even his forgiveness sounds like it had to be earned.