Quotes from Steve Rushin

A great presidential address - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Truman's Farewell Address, Kennedy's Inaugural Address - has the power to inspire.

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.

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.

Years ago, children helped my brother search for his lost ball at Jackson Park Golf Course in Chicago - and even offered to sell it back to him on the next tee. That entrepreneurial spirit, on the site of the 1893 World's Fair - which introduced Cracker Jacks to the United States - exemplifies America, to say nothing of American public golf.

The only thing wider than my family's mean streak is my family's cheap streak.

After the abrupt death of my mother, Jane, on Sept. 5, 1991, of a disease called amyloidosis, my dad took up golf at 57. He and my mother had always played tennis - a couples' game of mixed doubles and tennis bracelets and Love-Love. But in mourning, Dad turned Job-like to golf, a game of frustration and golf widows and solitary hours on the range.

I turned 7 in 1973 and remember Bobby Riggs arriving at the Astrodome on a chariot pulled by showgirls before his 'battle of the sexes' tennis match against Billie Jean King.

In our house, the name for all athletic shoes - any that weren't dress or 'church' shoes - was 'tennis shoes,' or 'tennies.'

Cinderella is older than she lets on. She's ancient. She's had work done. The Disney film was based on Charles Perreault's French story 'Cendrillon,' published in 1697.

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.

History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.

I'd watch the news with my dad, and he'd quietly mock the anchors. An anchorman might say, 'Police are searching for...' and my dad would say in the anchorman's voice, 'the man who gave me this haircut.' This was in the real Ron Burgundy '70s. And I would laugh and start doing it myself.

At its root, 'quit' means 'to set free' - think of an acquittal in a court of law - and to quit is often to be liberated.

If you've never quit anything, you really ought to try. And if at first you don't succeed, try again.

'Hard Knocks' seems to have done for the self-serious NFL what the witch did for Rapunzel: persuaded it, somehow, to let its hair down.

Grafted onto street clothes and removed from the field of play, jerseys don't even flatter men in their physical prime. Witness any baseball player wearing a uniform top over dress shirt and slacks at a press conference podium.

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.

As life speeds by, nostalgia has a shorter pregnancy. Games still in progress are given the straight-to-sepia status of "Instant Classics" no matter how oxymoronic that phrase appears.

In any other context, 'icing' is a great and exciting word: The proverbial icing on the cake, for instance, is a bonus - a wonderful thing on top of another wonderful thing. But in hockey, icing merely results in the referee's raising his right hand, as if swearing an oath to the deity of downtime.

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.

In our age of over-sharing, we know everything about everyone else, robbing them of mystery and thus of power.

The phrase 'NFL combine' always sounds redundant, because the league is a combine harvester, reaping and threshing everything in its path.

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.

Football, played at its highest level, is catastrophic. Even relatively minor afflictions are grotesque and bookworthy.