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

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.

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.

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

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

If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don't have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here's what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a general named Eisenhower.

Valet parking is an essential at any decent club.

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.

I gather most people don't remember that when the U.S. Open first went to Pebble Beach in 1972, a big deal was made of the Open going to a public course for the first time.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Putting is not an art, it's a dreaded evil. No wise man ever said that.

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

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.

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.

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.

Every immortal except Jack Nicklaus has hit a wall and stopped making putts he had to make in order to win. Jack did it for 20 years.

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.

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.

When you're a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It's not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.

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

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.

My real heroes have always been sportswriters.

The ocean-bordered southern part of California has always been a place of Hollywood make-believe, casual opulence, suntans and jewelry.

The Masters is a sell-out annually, and even the scalpers mind their manners.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody else is Tiger Woods. Not on this planet.

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.'

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

I'd follow Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson anywhere.

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

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

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

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.

I love Twitter.

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

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 hate political correctness.

There are no Dave Marrs anymore.

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.

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.

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.'

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

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