sports

Our team was surprisingly consistent this year. We closed with a seven-seven record. We lost seven at home and seven on the road.

Golf is like a love affair: if you don't take it seriously it's no fun if you do take it seriously it breaks your heart.

player: Can I reach it with a five iron? caddie: Eventually.

All pro athletes are bilingual. They speak English and profanity.

Golf is a good preoccupation but as the meaning of life ... it lacks a few things.

What a terrible round. I only hit two good balls all day and that was when I stepped on a rake in a bunker.

Men are very confident people. Even a sixty-year-old man with no arms thinks he could play in the Super Bowl if he had to.

This guy is such an obvious cheater that once when he had a hole in one he wrote down zero on his scorecard.

You know you're getting old when you start watching golf on TV and enjoying it.

Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.

Golf and sex: Two things you can really enjoy without being that good at them.

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'", March 25, 2007.)

Someone who doesn't make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn't act like he'd just become king of the world, either. Athletes in my day were simply humble in our victory.I believe we were more mature then...Maybe it's because the media puts so much pressure on athletes; maybe it's also the money. In my day we competed for the love of the sport...In my day we patted the guy who beat us on the back, wished him well, and that was it.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

Its me own battle... and I'm seeing me body take on me mind.... BIG TIME!

The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.

The sports pages are men's pages, although they are not presented as such. /.../ On foreign fields, the men win their trophies, or lose their honour, doing battle on the nation's behalf. The readers, mainly men, are invited to see these male exploits in terms of the whole homeland, and, thus, men's concerns are presented as if defining the whole national honour.The parallel between sport and warfare seems obvious...