The real driver of my golf game is family. The family that plays together stays together, at least literally so.
In the Gospels, we are reminded, 'The very hairs of your head are all numbered.' And your numbered hairs, like your numbered days, recede daily.
In 2007, Prince performed at the halftime of the Super Bowl. The stage in Miami was wreathed in purple light, and it poured during his performance, so that he played 'Purple Rain' in a purple rain.
Yes, sports are very often very boring, which is good and necessary: If games were one long highlight, we wouldn't have any highlights at all.
For most of the twentieth century, a Minnesotan abroad could fix his home state in the cosmos by invoking for his hosts the name Charles Lindbergh or Bob Dylan, native sons who were claimed by the world and never really returned to the Gopher State.
If you've never quit anything, you really ought to try. And if at first you don't succeed, try again.
Golf tough guys - like movie tough guys - are almost always inscrutable, just beyond our full understanding.
On its surface, the HBO documentary series 'Hard Knocks,' about the New York Jets' training camp, resembles another HBO series, 'The Sopranos.' Both star the stout patriarch of a New Jersey 'family' preoccupied with food, intimidation, and florid profanity.
Outside Buckingham Palace, the Royal Standard flies only when the reigning monarch is in residence. Sadly, there's no similar flag outside The Woods Jupiter, which Tiger opened in the summer of 2015, spending a reported $8 million to make an upscale sports bar-and-restaurant in his image.
All kingdoms look small through an airplane window - little dominions built on quicksand. But looking up from the ground, where most of us stand, they're rather impressive.
I remember seeing Letterman do stand-up on 'The Tonight Show.' Or, it's probably more accurate to say, I remember hearing him do stand-up, because the Carson show existed mainly as sound leaking under my bedroom door at night. I'd hear Johnny telling jokes and my dad laughing at them.
We can project just about anything we want onto NFL owners - one of them is named Arthur Blank, for heaven's sake. He's a walking Mad Lib, just waiting for us to complete him.
As good as NFL Films is at making players human, it's even better at making players superhuman. No Hollywood studio has made movies that are more grand or gorgeous. Every meticulous shot of 'Hard Knocks' is a vision: every slow-motion spiral, every shaved head steaming like a Manhattan manhole cover.
Humans had run barefoot for millennia, and some still preferred doing so in the modern Stone Age of the mid-20th century, when the handful of people running for exercise often wore whatever they happened to have on at the moment of inspiration.
When people ask if Marquette University is in Michigan, and I tell them my alma mater is in Milwaukee, they sometimes say, 'What's the difference?'
That's what Letterman did. He mocked everything and everyone in show business, even though he was at the top of show business. He was in it but not really of it, and that's one thing I came to love about him. I mean, you can't sit there and interview Cher and pretend you're not in show business, but he managed to pull it off somehow.
Every era has its cartoon rich guys, but most of them are actual cartoons - Daddy Warbucks, Scrooge McDuck, C. Montgomery Burns.
Swish: A made basket. Swoosh: The Nike logo. Swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh: A thousand coaches in nylon tracksuits, walking through hotel lobbies at the Final Four.
'Uff da,' for the unenlightened, is Norwegian for 'oy vey' and is a common expression in Minnesotese.
Nouns are seldom improved by the modifier 'public.' Few of us, given a private alternative, prefer public restrooms or public transportation or public displays of affection.
