Pro athletes are told from the moment they first put on sneakers to check their politics at the locker-room door. But 2011 wasn’t an ordinary year, on or off the playing field, from the Arab Spring to Occupy USA, to the lockouts in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L., which had the effect of forcing athletes out of their SportsCenter comfort zone and into talking about the real world. Below are a series of quotes from the past year that showed a glimpse of a different kind of athlete, reflecting on and even shaping the world around them.
