Until Sammy Baugh - pro football in Texas was a one-paragraph story on the third page of the Monday sports section.

Tennis was a game invented by a woman named Samantha Tennis in 1839, in the village of Lobsworth, County of Kent, as a diversion for the wealthy and titled Englishmen of the region, who had nothing better to do at the time but drink, belch and wear funny clothes.

Professionalism in tennis ... only resulted in making billionaires out of rude children, producing an onslaught of moody defectors, and a lot of guys with hair that looks as if bats slept in it... Meanwhile, my head swims with the thought that I have watched tennis progress from Don Budge and Alice Marble to Farrah Fawcett becoming John McEnroe's mother-in-law.

The maplewood flat-finished Martin had represented the most outrageous luxury in her life when she bought it in 1971 for four hundred dollars. But Lonnie Slocum assured her the Martin was a good investment, even if she never learned to play it better than an acid head who was into heavy metal.

Juanita found herself at Old Jeemy's radio station in a room she could have sworn was a laboratory where creatures with antennas in their heads, knobs for eyes, jagged arms, and dangly legs conducted experiments on the bodies of dead vocalists.

When Ballesteros triumphed at the British Open in 1979, for his first major win, he hit so few fairways off the tee that he was often mistaken for a gallery marshall.

I had always suspected that trying to play golf in the company of big-time pros and a gallery would be something like walking naked into choir practice.