Fort Worth is friendly; it's still a Texas town. It's the most Texas city in Texas.
Dan Jenkins
I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn't exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years.
Here's all I know about Dubai: It's one of those somewhere-over-there places where they make sand.
A sportswriter's life means never sitting with your wife or family at the games. Still working after everyone has gone to the party... Digging beneath a coach's lies, not to forget those of athletic directors and general managers and owners of pro teams. Keeping a confidence. Risking it.
The U.S. won the majors 29-11 in the 1980s. That's when Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus were carrying the ball, and when Seve Ballesteros was becoming a Brit in the minds of English and Scottish journalists.
Golf is 90% mental. Once you know how to hold the club, swing it, it's all in the mind.
When I was a lad in my 20s, as carefree and debonair as any other underpaid newspaperman, I happened to be a golfer who could flirt with par fairly often, and I was adventurous enough in those days to play any known or unknown thief who showed up at Goat Hills for whatever amount he fancied.
My favorite sport, frankly, is college football. I'm a college football junkie, even though I'm associated with golf and like golf and have played it all my life.
I'd follow Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson anywhere.
I've worked my whole life and never missed a deadline.
Nobody can make a putt that breaks to the right. It's unnatural. Unless you're left-handed, of course. Standing over a putt that breaks to the right can actually make you dizzy. I've long thought that right-breaking putts are a major contributor to mental and physical ill health.
If you see a player out in public having dinner, chances are he's with his boring money manager or some boring rich guy he hopes to design a golf course for.
Every immortal except Jack Nicklaus has hit a wall and stopped making putts he had to make in order to win. Jack did it for 20 years.
I don't suppose anybody's ever enjoyed being who they are more than Arnold's enjoyed being Arnold Palmer.
Of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower gets credit for doing more for golf than any other White House resident, a mid- to high-handicapper though he was.
The president I came to know best was George Herbert Walker Bush. No. 41 in your program, No. 1 on your list of fast-playing golfers.
There's usually one piece in 'Vanity Fair' every month that grabs me, but when it presents hatchet jobs without substantiation to impress its liberal friends, I laugh first, then toss.
Nobody else is Tiger Woods. Not on this planet.
It must be the PGA Championship if it's August and you can sit down and talk to the heat or reach inside your shirt, where it's 110 degrees, and grab handfuls of humidity.
I think newspapers will survive in some form or another.
Sally Jenkins of the 'Washington Post' is the best sports columnist in the country. Second best is Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN.com, and third is Dan Wetzel on Yahoo!
The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting just as an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow.
There are no Dave Marrs anymore.
I just come from a school where you have to win something to be accepted.
Being a club pro and all, a guy trying to keep up with golf's modern technology, I hadn't found much time for Internet dating, but then one day I knew I'd met the girl of my dreams when she replied to a comment I'd made on You-and-Me.com. She said, 'I love it when you talk equipment to me.'
Everybody in the Olympics is paid. Lindsay Vonn is going to make a million dollars whether she skis or not.
I'd rather be doing something than not doing something.
If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don't have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here's what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a general named Eisenhower.
The PGA Championship, last of the majors each year, might well be accustomed to having fun poked at it by the print press for being mired in August, but this isn't fair.
Presidents are nice people. They're nice, fun-loving people who have great jobs.
The first thing they gave me at 'Sports Illustrated' was a first-class air card. 'And oh, by the way, there's the petty cash drawer,' they told me. 'Take a few thousand dollars for expenses.'
My life has been very lucky, but I made some of that luck.
Just think about it: what in the name of God would Alabama be without the University of Alabama? What would Oklahoma be without the University of Oklahoma? Nothing.
My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'
I don't know how television or radio is going to survive without newspapers because that's where they get all their news. It's going to be hopeless.
The reason I wrote about women's golf is because I've helped out some with the Kathy Whitworth Cup, a tournament they have in Fort Worth every year where they invite 60 of the best junior golfers in the country and even some foreign players.
Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.
I get 'USA Today,' the 'New York Times,' 'Wall Street Journal' and the 'Star-Telegram' at my doorstep. I can't do without them.
The greatly anticipated 2009 Masters was like going to a Broadway hit and finding out that the star, Sir Tiger Woods, was off that night, and his replacement was the cab driver who dropped you off at the theater.
You must remind yourself at all times that the golf ball is nothing. It's an object. It's something to be swatted and sometimes lost and not even looked for.
Valet parking is an essential at any decent club.
First, I thought Twitter was some kind of hybrid car being developed by Government Motors. Then I thought it was a new bite-size snack combining what's best of the Frito and the Cheeto. Then I found out it was me. On a laptop. At the U.S. Open. Having fun.
There's nothing anyone can do about Tiger Woods but look at his game and swoon.
Vijay Singh won a playoff in 2004 at Whistling Straits after a final-round 76, which was the highest last round by the winner of any major since 1938, when Reg Whitcombe won the British Open with a 78 in a storm that blew down the exhibition tent at Sandwich.
Even as a little kid, I was fascinated by newspapers and magazines. They were my TV. I'd be the first one up to grab the morning paper, mainly to look at the sports pictures, the war pictures.
You can't have a U.S. Open anymore without an extra course to store all the hospitality tents. I used to be able to drive up to the clubhouse and park like the players. Now, there are seven corporate hospitality guys who have my spot, and I'm on a bus.
I gather most people don't remember that when the U.S. Open first went to Pebble Beach in 1972, a big deal was made of the Open going to a public course for the first time.
Locker rooms and grill rooms are still the best places to find out things you don't know - at the Masters or any other golf tournament.
Real golf is the 20 million people who play once a week or once a month.
High school golf, college golf and the decade that followed all come back to me now as one big raucous, goofy gangsome.
