Here's all I know about Dubai: It's one of those somewhere-over-there places where they make sand.
— Dan Jenkins
Putting is not an art, it's a dreaded evil. No wise man ever said that.
The Masters, while it has slowly gained equal importance as a major, isn't really the championship of anything.
I quickly discovered that trying to go play golf while living in Manhattan was about as easy as trying to grab a taxi while standing out in front of Saks Fifth Avenue in the freezing rain on the last shopping day before Christmas.
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.
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.
You count a man's U.S. Amateur titles after he starts winning professional majors. That's something any intelligent golf writer with a sense of history is supposed to know.
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.
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.
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.'
Among the many things that have slipped up on me while my back was turned are all of these challenging and well-manicured public courses that have sprung up across America with elegant bars and restaurants.
Marty Russo was too good a golfer to be a servant of the people.
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 like to be entertained, not smothered with 'literary' riddles.
There have been so many great moments in golf that you even forget some of them.
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.'
I probably remember the 1954 Masters more vividly than any of the others.
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.
At times, my very own media makes me cringe, and occasionally out loud. By the way, nothing clears the head like an out-loud cringe.
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.
High school golf, college golf and the decade that followed all come back to me now as one big raucous, goofy gangsome.
Historians tell us that a gentleman named John Ball once captured eight British Amateur titles.
The ocean-bordered southern part of California has always been a place of Hollywood make-believe, casual opulence, suntans and jewelry.
Nobody else is Tiger Woods. Not on this planet.
If you're a friend or a relative of George Herbert Walker Bush, Prez 41, or George W. Bush, Prez 43, or any other Bushes, then you know an 18-hole round of golf shouldn't take more than three hours out of your day - there are other important things to do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Anybody can make jokes. But unless they come from conviction, and there's truth in them, you haven't nailed it. They aren't as funny as they could be, and they don't make a point.
Golf was never a religion to me.
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.
When you're a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It's not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.
Valet parking is an essential at any decent club.
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.
I haven't looked for a golf ball since mulligans were free, which was a law I passed in 1995.
The Masters is a sell-out annually, and even the scalpers mind their manners.
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.
Prescott Bush was himself a president of the U. S. Golf Association at one time - 1935 - before he became a U.S. senator from the state of Connecticut.
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.
The recreational golfer who gives it careful thought will conclude that the favorite golf hole in his life played downhill, gradually or severely, and normally was downwind as well.
The golf ball has no sense at all, which is why it has to be given stern lectures constantly, especially during the act of putting.
There was a time when caddies couldn't wear shorts.
The first president I met was L. B. J.
I used to never miss the 'New Yorker' or 'New York.' Now I never bother.
There have been so many great tournaments that I've been privileged to see, and people paid me to go watch, that I'm awfully grateful for it.
The key to any good sports story is identifying the defining moment. In football games or a boxing match, it's usually pretty obvious. But in golf, sometimes it happens on Thursday. Usually it's Sunday, but guys who don't know the game, they can miss it.
I think a great athlete transcends eras.
