Quotes from Steve Rushin

I can't stand another night in a hotel. Just being away. You miss the kids.

I spent a year slaving over a hot rollergrill in a Metrodome concession stand and watched the World Series there - and a Super Bowl and a Final Four. I can honestly say - regardless of outcome - that I left every game floating on air.

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.

Though we endow them with human features - heads, faces, heels, toes - golf clubs are profoundly inhuman tools.

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.

I'm a recovering jersey wearer who can't bear to get rid of the blaze-orange Knicks warmup top that makes me look like James Carville on a highway repair crew.

I had started writing for 'Sports Illustrated,' which was really my dream job growing up. But the writing probably read like I was auditioning to write for 'Letterman' or '70s-era Carson.

Baseball consists of a million threads of dullness, on a loom of ennui, woven into a tapestry of tedium.

I never learned the secret handshake. That may be one of the reasons I've grown to love English soccer.

Scarcity drives up demand, and the short golf season in Minnesota makes residents of that state mad for the sport. It's the same reason ancient Scandinavians worshiped the sun: because they saw so little of it.

Just in the last week of his life, you could have seen him at Walgreens or at the Electric Fetus, where he often shopped for records - an astonishing sight, like the Mona Lisa taking in her own portrait at the Louvre. Prince, paradoxically, was reclusive but always around.

My wife's name, Rebecca Lobo, is on sandwiches and street signs in New England. It adorns the arena rafters at the University of Connecticut, where she first became a basketball star. Her high school in Massachusetts is on Rebecca Lobo Way, a nice trump card to play at reunions.

My first interview at 'SI,' I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.

Golf tough guys - like movie tough guys - are almost always inscrutable, just beyond our full understanding.

When should a man stop wearing sports jerseys? When the buttons of his White Sox top finally pop, like rivets on a distressed ocean liner? When the pinstripes of his Yankees shirt have grown wider at the midsection than at the top, as the longitudinal lines on a globe?

With the exception of undertakers, athletes are the only professionals obliged to feign sorrow on a daily basis, pretending that every June baseball loss is a tragedy requiring library silence in the clubhouse.

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.

As a kid, I didn't know that 'All in the Family' was satirizing male chauvinism or that Bobby Riggs was a self-promoting put-on. Many of us didn't get the irony and went on making fun of women and girls who wanted to play sports, especially the same sports that men and boys traditionally played.

Everything gleamed or glinted on TV in the '70s, from the 'flavor crystals' in Folgers coffee to the yellow dentures dipped in Polident and instantly restored to pristine, piano-key whiteness.

The first words Rebecca Lobo ever spoke to me when we met in a Manhattan bar in 2001 were, 'Aren't you the guy who just mocked women's basketball in 'Sports Illustrated'?' I blushed, broke out in a flop sweat and said, 'Yes.'

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.

Hockey belongs to the Cartoon Network, where a person can be pancaked by an ACME anvil, then expanded - accordion-style - back to full stature, without any lasting side effect.

By the age of 18, the average American has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television, most of them occurring during Game 1 of the NHL playoff series.

He pulled the shade, climbed into bed, thought of the Replacements, a band from his hometown singing about needing a job and needing a girl. Rodney needed both. But he needed the job to get the girl. And he needed ambition to get either.