My wife travels with me and my golf partner, Shawn Barker...not because she loves golf. She simply loves the surroundings and the time spent wandering places like Flagstaff and Monterey and Santa Rosa. After a yoga session in Santa Rosa this past week, she sat alone in a coffee shop and a man across the…
I miss the elocution of Yogi Berra. He once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Last night as I watched Draymond Green’s leg fly north like a sledge hammer on wings directly into the fork of Steven Adam's wickets, I couldn’t help but remember how much better it was in the old…
I can envision a time when I stop watching sports, because it's become self-congratulatory, narcissistic, all-important, and ugly. And then a guy like Buddy comes along and redeems my cynicism and helps me remember the days of my youth when I played sports for no other reason than I loved the thrill of seeing the…
This was a football catch for the ages in a million backyards, a thousand Friday nights, and a hundred campus Saturdays, just not according to the technocrats at the National Football League.
When Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go's sings "Heaven is a place on earth" I stop whatever I'm doing and sing along. 'Ooh baby do you know what that's worth, you make heaven a place on earth' It happened today, in my truck while driving to Tulsa and a blue-haired lady with a handicap sign hanging…
The bus crossed the 7th street bridge and I peered over the rail through an open window at the eddies of a muddy river, swirling coffee relentlessly shaping the bank of naked earth. On my first day of junior high ringing bells punctuated my hourly class schedule. This change in my academic life assaulted my…
I love to watch athletes compete…any age, any level…just lay it all out there and try, find a way, play better than anyone ever thought you could. Runners best their career time, diving shortstops covered in dirt, cross-country runners busting the tape with nothing left, talking to their legs and ordering them forward by sheer…
Tonight the Red Sox, my favorite Junior Circuit team, and the Cardinals, my favorite all-time baseball team, square off in Game one of the 2013 World Series. Don't tell MLB, but it's really just the Championship of the U.S. since we don't invite the rest of the world or other planets. Anyway, in 1967, I…
Golf balls litter our course like orphaned Easter eggs. There is a bucket of balls sitting on the first tee and I’ve noticed my Dad and Mom and Karen whacking shots from the first tee to points distant. They hit balls with corporate logos, balls beaten into shapes more closely resembling eggs, neon lime balls…
“Golf is a game of considerable passion, either of the explosive type, or that which burns inwardly and sears the soul.” Bobby Jones I can’t seem to get golf courses out of my head. Golf layouts stick to my brain like gum on the underside of a school desk...out of sight but always there. The…
