When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.
Steve Rushin
What's the best baseball name of all time? Is it Champ Summers? Clyde Kluttz? Razor Shines? Scipio Spinks? Sibby Sisti? Creepy Crespi? Before you answer, consider that Coco Crisp is not even the game's top Coco, an honor retired by Coco Laboy.
Baseball consists of a million threads of dullness, on a loom of ennui, woven into a tapestry of tedium.
'Uff da,' for the unenlightened, is Norwegian for 'oy vey' and is a common expression in Minnesotese.
The only thing wider than my family's mean streak is my family's cheap streak.
Putting is so difficult, so universally vexing, that the best the pros can do is tell us how to miss. 'Miss it on the pro side,' they say, meaning miss it above the hole. I can't even do that consistently. I miss it on the pro side. I miss it on the amateur side. I miss it on both sides of the clown's mouth.
As a bald man who happens to play golf, or a golfer who happens to be bald, I'll never know the pleasures of a golf visor.
I'm an unabashed sports photo fanboy, the kind of weirdo who seeks out the infinitesimal picture credits.
My first interview at 'SI,' I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.
As good as NFL Films is at making players human, it's even better at making players superhuman. No Hollywood studio has made movies that are more grand or gorgeous. Every meticulous shot of 'Hard Knocks' is a vision: every slow-motion spiral, every shaved head steaming like a Manhattan manhole cover.
'Hard Knocks' seems to have done for the self-serious NFL what the witch did for Rapunzel: persuaded it, somehow, to let its hair down.
Outside Buckingham Palace, the Royal Standard flies only when the reigning monarch is in residence. Sadly, there's no similar flag outside The Woods Jupiter, which Tiger opened in the summer of 2015, spending a reported $8 million to make an upscale sports bar-and-restaurant in his image.
The man who consumes sports to the exclusion of all other things will never be well-rounded.
The real driver of my golf game is family. The family that plays together stays together, at least literally so.
If you own face paint and a bulb horn and you're not a circus clown, you might be uncool.
Nouns are seldom improved by the modifier 'public.' Few of us, given a private alternative, prefer public restrooms or public transportation or public displays of affection.
In 1984, as a college freshman, I spent a fall weekend at a friend's house in suburban Chicago. His father worked for Beatrice Foods, a sponsor of the Chicago Marathon, and we watched that race from the finish line as a Welshman named Steve Jones set a new world marathon record. I was bewitched by the race and, especially, the clock.
Compassion and empathy are anathema to sports.
In any other context, 'icing' is a great and exciting word: The proverbial icing on the cake, for instance, is a bonus - a wonderful thing on top of another wonderful thing. But in hockey, icing merely results in the referee's raising his right hand, as if swearing an oath to the deity of downtime.
I can't stand another night in a hotel. Just being away. You miss the kids.
In golf, a wedge issue means just that: You can't hit your sand wedge, or your lob wedge needs to be regrooved. In politics, a wedge issue is more serious still: It's one that splits the electorate, dividing voters along ideological fault lines.
Hype covers every surface of mass culture, and sports fans are intimately familiar with it - the heavy-breathing buildup that leads, inevitably, to a first-round knockout or a 30-point blowout or a fourth-inning rainout.
Hurricane Irene's advance coverage was heavy on worst-case scenarios. Thank goodness they didn't pan out.
Every era has its cartoon rich guys, but most of them are actual cartoons - Daddy Warbucks, Scrooge McDuck, C. Montgomery Burns.
Sam Snead had perhaps the most stylish solution to the balding golfer: A snappy fedora that became his signature style, so much so that many never knew he was tonsorially bereft.
Just in the last week of his life, you could have seen him at Walgreens or at the Electric Fetus, where he often shopped for records - an astonishing sight, like the Mona Lisa taking in her own portrait at the Louvre. Prince, paradoxically, was reclusive but always around.
We can project just about anything we want onto NFL owners - one of them is named Arthur Blank, for heaven's sake. He's a walking Mad Lib, just waiting for us to complete him.
I can't putt. The reasons are infinite. When lining up a putt, I can't remember if the ball always breaks to the ocean or to the valley or away from Pinnacle Peak. And because I took up the game in Minnesota, in what is often called Middle America, I also grew up asking, 'To which ocean does it break?'
I spent a year slaving over a hot rollergrill in a Metrodome concession stand and watched the World Series there - and a Super Bowl and a Final Four. I can honestly say - regardless of outcome - that I left every game floating on air.
Trying to keep up is the ultimate act of uncoolness. And so I still retrieve not one but two daily newspapers from the driveway.
After the abrupt death of my mother, Jane, on Sept. 5, 1991, of a disease called amyloidosis, my dad took up golf at 57. He and my mother had always played tennis - a couples' game of mixed doubles and tennis bracelets and Love-Love. But in mourning, Dad turned Job-like to golf, a game of frustration and golf widows and solitary hours on the range.
Solitary pursuits like playing video games and skateboarding can't compete with the thrill of mobbing a teammate as he scores the winning run - nor do they end with a postgame trip to Dairy Queen.
Headline writers love the phrase 'Power Grab,' but you can't really grab it, can you? Power is a greased watermelon, a wisp of smoke, difficult to grasp, harder to hold, impossible to control while getting both feet down in bounds.
History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.
Once upon a time in America, people aspired to party like a rock star. Now, rock stars aspire to party like a football owner.
You never forget your first felony. Mine was mail tampering. As a hoops-crazed 13-year-old, I rifled through a new neighbor's mailbox to confirm that the occupant of the split-level on 98 1/2 Street in Bloomington, Minn., really was former Gophers basketball star Flip Saunders.
If Charlie Sheen is the 21st century figure most closely associated with 'Winning,' it is perhaps time to consider an alternative to victory.
Years ago, children helped my brother search for his lost ball at Jackson Park Golf Course in Chicago - and even offered to sell it back to him on the next tee. That entrepreneurial spirit, on the site of the 1893 World's Fair - which introduced Cracker Jacks to the United States - exemplifies America, to say nothing of American public golf.
I'd watch the news with my dad, and he'd quietly mock the anchors. An anchorman might say, 'Police are searching for...' and my dad would say in the anchorman's voice, 'the man who gave me this haircut.' This was in the real Ron Burgundy '70s. And I would laugh and start doing it myself.
The most enduring Top 10 ever written wasn't written at all, but chiseled onto stone tablets and conveyed down Mount Sinai by Moses, who introduced to the world not just a set of Biblical precepts but also a new format for starting arguments: the list of 10 things.
At its root, 'quit' means 'to set free' - think of an acquittal in a court of law - and to quit is often to be liberated.
That's what Letterman did. He mocked everything and everyone in show business, even though he was at the top of show business. He was in it but not really of it, and that's one thing I came to love about him. I mean, you can't sit there and interview Cher and pretend you're not in show business, but he managed to pull it off somehow.
My wife is an Olympic gold medalist, WNBA All-Star, 'Jeopardy!' champion, and Rhodes Scholarship finalist who was sung to by President Clinton, sung about by Ludacris, and serenaded on 'Sesame Street' by a chorus of Muppets.
Anyone who thinks sports are ruled by athletes need only think of American sports' most enduring tradition: Immediately after a championship, as the champagne sprays and the confetti falls, the trophy is passed not to the team captain but most often to the team owner, handed to him by his highest-ranking employee, the league commissioner.
Occasionally, Americans in large numbers are moved by a vanquished athlete's grief. Larry Bird with a towel over his head in 1979 comes immediately to mind. But more often, sports fans do the opposite - they delight in the desolation of a defeated archrival.
Quitting has always been the worst possible thing you can do in sports. It's downright un-American.
I had almost nothing published until I had something published in 'Sports Illustrated.' I started there as a fact-checker two weeks after I got out of college and was there for almost 20 years.
In 2007, Prince performed at the halftime of the Super Bowl. The stage in Miami was wreathed in purple light, and it poured during his performance, so that he played 'Purple Rain' in a purple rain.
Swish: A made basket. Swoosh: The Nike logo. Swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh: A thousand coaches in nylon tracksuits, walking through hotel lobbies at the Final Four.
A lot of people say they eat, drink, and sleep sports, but does anyone really do it, ingesting nothing but Dodger Dogs and Soda Shaqs and Greg Norman Zinfandels 24/7?
