Fort Worth is friendly; it's still a Texas town. It's the most Texas city in Texas.
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.
Here's all I know about Dubai: It's one of those somewhere-over-there places where they make sand.
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.
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.
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.
Valet parking is an essential at any decent club.
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.
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.
Nobody else is Tiger Woods. Not on this planet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
