A sportswriter's life means never sitting with your wife or family at the games. Still working after everyone has gone to the party... Digging beneath a coach's lies, not to forget those of athletic directors and general managers and owners of pro teams. Keeping a confidence. Risking it.

A good one iron shot is about as easy to come by as an understanding wife.

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.

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.

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.

Every golfer has at least 14 enemies: his clubs.