There is a special kind of quiet dishonesty on the internet: the inspirational sport quote. Half of them were never said by the person on the poster. The great man never said it, the great woman said something subtler, and the "ancient proverb" was written by a marketing intern in 2011.
When we set out to build Voices of the Game — a library of what sport's people have actually taught us about pressure, defeat, mastery and joy — we made one rule and gave ourselves no exceptions: every quote real and attributed, sourced, or honestly marked where authorship is uncertain. If we cannot stand behind a line, it does not ship. Where a beloved saying's author is genuinely unknown, we say so plainly rather than gift it to a famous name it never belonged to.
That rule is expensive. It means research, verification, and throwing away wonderful lines that turned out to be orphans. The library crossed ten thousand verified voices anyway, across fifteen sports and seven themes of the game's teaching — and I would rather have those than a million unverified ones.
Why be stubborn about this? Because the entire value of wisdom is that somebody earned it. When Billie Jean King talks about champions, the words carry the weight of every match behind them. Break the chain of attribution and you don't have wisdom — you have wallpaper.
Our members give these words to people they love, inside personalised books, at moments that matter. The least we owe them is that every word is true to its speaker. That's the standard. It has no exceptions, and it never will.
— Alten, founder