Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.

As every golfer knows, no one ever lost his mind over one shot. It is rather the gradual process of shot after shot watching your score go to tatters - knowing that you have found a different way to bogey each hole.

Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

In and of itself, sports may be trivial, but as a symbol of the American way of life, it has enormous weight. We are seen, worldwide, as an enormously competitive, enthusiastic people who work as hard as we play and play as hard as we work. When baseball - which has traditionally canceled one day of games for huge national celebrations or disasters - stops play for six days, that has reverberations in the national consciousness.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

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