“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.”

“All I've ever done is try to get at the truth of the matter.”

“Among the many things that have slipped up on me while my back was turned are all of these challenging and well-manicured public courses that have sprung up across America with elegant bars and restaurants.”

“Anybody can make jokes. But unless they come from conviction, and there's truth in them, you haven't nailed it. They aren't as funny as they could be, and they don't make a point.”

“Being a club pro and all, a guy trying to keep up with golf's modern technology, I hadn't found much time for Internet dating, but then one day I knew I'd met the girl of my dreams when she replied to a comment I'd made on You-and-Me.com. She said, 'I love it when you talk equipment to me.'”

“CEOs are worried they're going to get fired any minute. They're worried about their portfolios.”

“Even as a little kid, I was fascinated by newspapers and magazines. They were my TV. I'd be the first one up to grab the morning paper, mainly to look at the sports pictures, the war pictures.”

“Everybody in the Olympics is paid. Lindsay Vonn is going to make a million dollars whether she skis or not.”

“First, I thought Twitter was some kind of hybrid car being developed by Government Motors. Then I thought it was a new bite-size snack combining what's best of the Frito and the Cheeto. Then I found out it was me. On a laptop. At the U.S. Open. Having fun.”

“Fort Worth is friendly; it's still a Texas town. It's the most Texas city in Texas.”

“Golf is 90% mental. Once you know how to hold the club, swing it, it's all in the mind.”

“Golf was never a religion to me.”

“Here's all I know about Dubai: It's one of those somewhere-over-there places where they make sand.”

“I actually don't have a single regret, professionally or domestically. I planned it that way.”

“I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn't exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years.”

“I don't cover golf tournaments anymore - I preside over them.”

“I don't have contempt for Tiger Woods.”

“I don't know how television or radio is going to survive without newspapers because that's where they get all their news. It's going to be hopeless.”

“I don't suppose anybody's ever enjoyed being who they are more than Arnold's enjoyed being Arnold Palmer.”

“I get 'USA Today,' the 'New York Times,' 'Wall Street Journal' and the 'Star-Telegram' at my doorstep. I can't do without them.”

“I hate political correctness.”

“I just come from a school where you have to win something to be accepted.”

“I like to be entertained, not smothered with 'literary' riddles.”

“I love Twitter.”

“I probably remember the 1954 Masters more vividly than any of the others.”

“I quickly discovered that trying to go play golf while living in Manhattan was about as easy as trying to grab a taxi while standing out in front of Saks Fifth Avenue in the freezing rain on the last shopping day before Christmas.”

“I think a great athlete transcends eras.”

“I think newspapers will survive in some form or another.”

“I used to never miss the 'New Yorker' or 'New York.' Now I never bother.”

“I'd follow Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson anywhere.”

“I'd rather be doing something than not doing something.”

“If you see a player out in public having dinner, chances are he's with his boring money manager or some boring rich guy he hopes to design a golf course for.”

“If you're a friend or a relative of George Herbert Walker Bush, Prez 41, or George W. Bush, Prez 43, or any other Bushes, then you know an 18-hole round of golf shouldn't take more than three hours out of your day - there are other important things to do.”

“In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.”

“I've worked my whole life and never missed a deadline.”

“Jack Nicklaus is the greatest winner I've ever seen.”

“Just think about it: what in the name of God would Alabama be without the University of Alabama? What would Oklahoma be without the University of Oklahoma? Nothing.”

“Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam.”

“Locker rooms and grill rooms are still the best places to find out things you don't know - at the Masters or any other golf tournament.”

“Marty Russo was too good a golfer to be a servant of the people.”

“My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'”

“My favorite sport, frankly, is college football. I'm a college football junkie, even though I'm associated with golf and like golf and have played it all my life.”

“My life has been very lucky, but I made some of that luck.”

“My real heroes have always been sportswriters.”

“Nobody can make a putt that breaks to the right. It's unnatural. Unless you're left-handed, of course. Standing over a putt that breaks to the right can actually make you dizzy. I've long thought that right-breaking putts are a major contributor to mental and physical ill health.”

“Nobody else is Tiger Woods. Not on this planet.”

“Of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower gets credit for doing more for golf than any other White House resident, a mid- to high-handicapper though he was.”

“Players don't usually like anybody who makes more money than they do.”

“Prescott Bush was himself a president of the U. S. Golf Association at one time - 1935 - before he became a U.S. senator from the state of Connecticut.”

“Presidents are nice people. They're nice, fun-loving people who have great jobs.”

“Real golf is the 20 million people who play once a week or once a month.”

“Sally Jenkins of the 'Washington Post' is the best sports columnist in the country. Second best is Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN.com, and third is Dan Wetzel on Yahoo!”

“Something mystical happens to every writer who goes to the Masters for the first time, some sort of emotional experience that results in a search party having to be sent out to recover his typewriter from a clump of azaleas.”

“The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting just as an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow.”

“The first president I met was L. B. J.”

“The first thing they gave me at 'Sports Illustrated' was a first-class air card. 'And oh, by the way, there's the petty cash drawer,' they told me. 'Take a few thousand dollars for expenses.'”

“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 greatly anticipated 2009 Masters was like going to a Broadway hit and finding out that the star, Sir Tiger Woods, was off that night, and his replacement was the cab driver who dropped you off at the theater.”

“The key to any good sports story is identifying the defining moment. In football games or a boxing match, it's usually pretty obvious. But in golf, sometimes it happens on Thursday. Usually it's Sunday, but guys who don't know the game, they can miss it.”

“The PGA Championship, last of the majors each year, might well be accustomed to having fun poked at it by the print press for being mired in August, but this isn't fair.”

“The president I came to know best was George Herbert Walker Bush. No. 41 in your program, No. 1 on your list of fast-playing golfers.”

“The reason I wrote about women's golf is because I've helped out some with the Kathy Whitworth Cup, a tournament they have in Fort Worth every year where they invite 60 of the best junior golfers in the country and even some foreign players.”

“The recreational golfer who gives it careful thought will conclude that the favorite golf hole in his life played downhill, gradually or severely, and normally was downwind as well.”

“The U.S. won the majors 29-11 in the 1980s. That's when Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus were carrying the ball, and when Seve Ballesteros was becoming a Brit in the minds of English and Scottish journalists.”

“There are no Dave Marrs anymore.”

“There have been so many great moments in golf that you even forget some of them.”

“There have been so many great tournaments that I've been privileged to see, and people paid me to go watch, that I'm awfully grateful for it.”

“There was a time when caddies couldn't wear shorts.”

“There's nothing anyone can do about Tiger Woods but look at his game and swoon.”

“There's usually one piece in 'Vanity Fair' every month that grabs me, but when it presents hatchet jobs without substantiation to impress its liberal friends, I laugh first, then toss.”

“Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.”

“Tiger Woods was a month away from 34 years of age when his debutantes began turning up in the news. He was a grown man with a wife and two children. Well, we supposed he had a wife, but that was before we learned she was only an ornament.”

“Title IX came along and changed a lot of things for the better, but nevertheless, it meant that money became more important.”

“Vijay Singh won a playoff in 2004 at Whistling Straits after a final-round 76, which was the highest last round by the winner of any major since 1938, when Reg Whitcombe won the British Open with a 78 in a storm that blew down the exhibition tent at Sandwich.”

“When I was a lad in my 20s, as carefree and debonair as any other underpaid newspaperman, I happened to be a golfer who could flirt with par fairly often, and I was adventurous enough in those days to play any known or unknown thief who showed up at Goat Hills for whatever amount he fancied.”

“You can't have a U.S. Open anymore without an extra course to store all the hospitality tents. I used to be able to drive up to the clubhouse and park like the players. Now, there are seven corporate hospitality guys who have my spot, and I'm on a bus.”

“You count a man's U.S. Amateur titles after he starts winning professional majors. That's something any intelligent golf writer with a sense of history is supposed to know.”

“You must remind yourself at all times that the golf ball is nothing. It's an object. It's something to be swatted and sometimes lost and not even looked for.”