I don't have contempt for Tiger Woods.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think a great athlete transcends eras.

Golf was never a religion to me.

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.'

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Historians tell us that a gentleman named John Ball once captured eight British Amateur titles.

I haven't looked for a golf ball since mulligans were free, which was a law I passed in 1995.

High school golf, college golf and the decade that followed all come back to me now as one big raucous, goofy gangsome.

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.

The Masters, while it has slowly gained equal importance as a major, isn't really the championship of anything.

At times, my very own media makes me cringe, and occasionally out loud. By the way, nothing clears the head like an out-loud cringe.

It must be the PGA Championship if it's August and you can sit down and talk to the heat or reach inside your shirt, where it's 110 degrees, and grab handfuls of humidity.

The truth is, we are a culture built on a reward system, and our instinctive pursuit of pleasure can often lead us astray. We will rationalize anything into an excuse to indulge in whatever it is that makes us feel temporarily satiated.

When it comes to birthdays, I think there are two camps. There are people like me, who choose to treat it like any other day, and then there are the 'birthday people.' You know, those people who claim the full month in which they were born as their own.

I often liken my love life to the pathetic fallacy found in a Bronte novel: a long and winding road tented by storm clouds and rain. Kidding.

A little confidence can make the simplest of T-shirts look like a million bucks.

There is something transformative about the act of finding your own way without a to-do list.

I've never really turned to my dad for anything, I think out of fear of the label of nepotism.

I like to refer to my small social circle as 'boutique.' And much like the hotels of the same ilk, my friends are all unique, high quality, and serve me good food. But more than that, they teach me things about the world and about myself that I couldn't learn anywhere else.

I've grown up around some incredibly funny people, which has been a blessing and curse because now I've been completely spoiled in terms of what I find funny.

Growing up, my height was faithfully tracked from infancy to my late teens on the door frame of my mom's office - the only place in my family's home in Toronto where writing on the walls was encouraged.

Valentine's Day is one of those tricky celebrations where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you love it, you're buying into a holiday created to sell greeting cards, bad bouquets, and shoddy love-themed stuffed animals. And if you're opposed to it, you're considered lonely and single and have clearly never had a valentine.

Despite probably needing one, I don't have a therapist. Why spend the money on my mental health when I can do far more productive things such as purchase iPhone apps and pay off parking tickets?

I grew up with my dad sitting us down at the holidays and putting on 'The Honeymooners.'

I will never have the willpower to completely swear off pizza or a good summer sale, but I'm working on realizing the difference between the occasional craving and the compulsion to mindlessly consume as a feeble means of self-medication.

The secret life of women is to men what the universe is to NASA - unimaginably infinite and completely undiscoverable.

It's that stubborn fixation on details that has invariably prevented me from getting excited about celebrating each passing year. Which is why my friends know that doing things such as throwing me surprise parties would only serve to surprise me with an overwhelming sense of panic and anxiety.

In many ways, the Internet is about diversification, and yet, in the wrong hands, the digital world can use those very examples to reinforce the narrowest of perspectives.

As a child, I seriously believed my family was going down the road to bankruptcy. I was denied virtually every popular trend, from heavily logoed Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers to amusement park season's passes.