Not even Barbra Streisand celebrates herself as tirelessly as golf celebrates itself.

I'm a great admirer of cartoons, because I can't do cartoons.

You can parody almost anything.

If the general attitude of Canadians toward their mighty neighbor to the south could be distilled into a single phrase, that phrase would probably be "Oh, shut up." The Americans talked too much, mainly about themselves. Their torrid love affair with their own history and legend exceeded-painfully-the quasi-British Canadian idea of modesty and self-restraint. ... They were forever busting their buttons in spasms of insufferable yahoo pride or all too publicly agonizing over their crises.

Here's a simple way to abolish golf's elitist and exclusionary image and make it a truly all-American sport: ditch that fifties-Republican-martini-drinker's green Brooks Brothers-style sport jacket and make the winner of the Masters slip on something in, say, black leather with plenty of metal studs.

No game designed to be played with the aid of personal servants by right-handed men who can't even bring along their dogs can be entirely good for the soul.

It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification.