What is the difference between a proportion and a sample?

A sample is the number of items taken from a population.

A proportion is a ratio of the number of successes to the number in the sample.

Say we surveyed 1024 people and 287 said their favorite sport to watch was football.

The proportion whose favorite sport to watch is football would be.

\frac{287}{1024}\approx .28

Or 28 %.

See now?

In this case, the population may be all the adults in the US. But we can not sample all of them, so we take a sample. In this case, that sample size was 1024.
Out of those 1024, 287 liked watching football as their favorite sport to watch.