I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

When life is suddenly more serious more of the time, there is also more need for it to be fun at least some of the time. That's why my family will be at a college football game this weekend. We need it. And deserve it, too. Not like a New York fireman deserves it. Or a medic at the Pentagon. But enough.

Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.

A major golf tournament is 40,000 sadists watching 144 masochists.