Trying to keep up is the ultimate act of uncoolness. And so I still retrieve not one but two daily newspapers from the driveway.
— Steve Rushin
Hurricane Irene's advance coverage was heavy on worst-case scenarios. Thank goodness they didn't pan out.
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.
Baseball consists of a million threads of dullness, on a loom of ennui, woven into a tapestry of tedium.
The Metrodome was built for football. Fans seated down the third-base line at a baseball game faced centerfield, so that they had to turn and look over their right shoulders to see home plate.
'Uff da,' for the unenlightened, is Norwegian for 'oy vey' and is a common expression in Minnesotese.
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.
For most of the twentieth century, a Minnesotan abroad could fix his home state in the cosmos by invoking for his hosts the name Charles Lindbergh or Bob Dylan, native sons who were claimed by the world and never really returned to the Gopher State.
I turned 7 in 1973 and remember Bobby Riggs arriving at the Astrodome on a chariot pulled by showgirls before his 'battle of the sexes' tennis match against Billie Jean King.
The first words Rebecca Lobo ever spoke to me when we met in a Manhattan bar in 2001 were, 'Aren't you the guy who just mocked women's basketball in 'Sports Illustrated'?' I blushed, broke out in a flop sweat and said, 'Yes.'
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.
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.
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.
Golf tough guys - like movie tough guys - are almost always inscrutable, just beyond our full understanding.
Golf mogul Donald Trump sports an arrangement of hair that is less a comb-over than a 'do-over, a candy-floss confection of gossamer wisps that comes off as the clumsiest cover-up since Watergate.
Because I'm a bald, dim-witted writer, people think I couldn't possibly be her husband, so they occasionally confuse me for someone more glamorous. At O'Hare airport, a man asked if he could take Rebecca's photo. When I reflexively stepped away, he said, 'No, no, no. I want your picture too, Andre Agassi.'
Sports and fashion move so fast that I can't possibly keep my ear to the ground. For one thing, my ear trumpet gets in the way.
The phrase 'NFL combine' always sounds redundant, because the league is a combine harvester, reaping and threshing everything in its path.
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.
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 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.
Broadcasters calling a big game are often reminded to let the action breathe. A great moment of a televised game doesn't need any narration, which is why the announcers - the good ones, anyway - shut up at the celebration and let the pictures do the talking.
Growing up in Bloomington, Minn., I loved the ritual of dressing for Little League - in white socks, blue stirrups, belted pants, a double-knit jersey, and the cap I'd hold over my face to screen out mosquitoes in right field.
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.
As a kid, I didn't know that 'All in the Family' was satirizing male chauvinism or that Bobby Riggs was a self-promoting put-on. Many of us didn't get the irony and went on making fun of women and girls who wanted to play sports, especially the same sports that men and boys traditionally played.
A great presidential address - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Truman's Farewell Address, Kennedy's Inaugural Address - has the power to inspire.
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.
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.
Golf balls are sweet: dimpled and sometimes even smiling.
Tough guys have to be tough. But tough guys don't have to be guys.
In the Gospels, we are reminded, 'The very hairs of your head are all numbered.' And your numbered hairs, like your numbered days, recede daily.
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.
My wife's name, Rebecca Lobo, is on sandwiches and street signs in New England. It adorns the arena rafters at the University of Connecticut, where she first became a basketball star. Her high school in Massachusetts is on Rebecca Lobo Way, a nice trump card to play at reunions.
If you own face paint and a bulb horn and you're not a circus clown, you might be uncool.
Hype is supposed to overpromise and underdeliver, not overpromise and overdeliver. Usually, it doesn't deliver at all - it takes your money and keeps your pizza.
Compassion and empathy are anathema to sports.
Yes, sports are very often very boring, which is good and necessary: If games were one long highlight, we wouldn't have any highlights at all.
When people ask if Marquette University is in Michigan, and I tell them my alma mater is in Milwaukee, they sometimes say, 'What's the difference?'
I'm an unabashed sports photo fanboy, the kind of weirdo who seeks out the infinitesimal picture credits.
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.
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.
In 1972, there was still a New York City law prohibiting women there from 'furnishing refreshments to the audience or spectators at any place of public amusement.' That's right: Until the law was repealed in 1977, it was technically illegal for women to work as popcorn vendors in Madison Square Garden.
Scarcity drives up demand, and the short golf season in Minnesota makes residents of that state mad for the sport. It's the same reason ancient Scandinavians worshiped the sun: because they saw so little of it.
The real driver of my golf game is family. The family that plays together stays together, at least literally so.
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?'
Though we endow them with human features - heads, faces, heels, toes - golf clubs are profoundly inhuman tools.
In our age of over-sharing, we know everything about everyone else, robbing them of mystery and thus of power.
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.
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.
