On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me (Abbreviated Edition)

1. Tiger.

Ugh. This again? I tell you one thing Tiger Woods has done by muzzling himself for the past three months: He's wrung all the intrigue out of this story. At this point, I'm so weary of the whole thing that I'm kind of hoping Tiger steps up to the microphone and speaks for twenty minutes about how he's been working with a new set of irons and how his sand shots have a higher trajectory and how he's reworking his swing plane. And then I hope he steps down and when someone asks him a question about his harem of female acquaintances with questionable ethics in the months to come, he says, "I already addressed these issues, and I'm not going to revisit the past." Of course, we can't get away from it: Last night, I heard a pretty solid rumor that a major gossip magazine is about to publish an expose about the "open marriage" of a prominent athlete. Six months ago, given the likeable public persona of this figure, such news would have been shocking and oddly compelling. Now, I just want it to go away.

2. Incoherent Self-Promotion

I've spent the past couple of days working on edits for this book, (which, conveniently enough, is now available for pre-order), so in that spirit, here are three random sentences, taken completely out of context, from the manuscript. If anyone out there can name the "he" in each of these sentences, you are so frighteningly channeled into my psyche that I will send you an autographed copy of Bigger Than the Game upon its release.

A.) Soon enough, he would take off his clothes.

B.) "I'd like to pull him out of the grave," she said, "and shoot him."

C.) He borrowed fifteen hundred dollars from his agent to make a down payment on a Datsun 280Z.

UPDATE: All right, so only one person bit on the trivia, perhaps because A.) No one particularly cares to win an autographed copy of an item that does not yet exist, and B.) These excerpts were far too random. Next time, I'll telegraph them a little better. In the meantime, here are the answers:

A.) Jim McMahon (in reference to his Super Bowl mooning).
B.) The wife of Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Hugh Culverhouse, upon learning her late husband may have been engaged in an affair with David Brinkley's wife. A few years earlier, Culverhouse drafted Bo Jackson with the team's first pick and then managed to bungle the negotiations so badly that Bo wound up playing baseball.
C.) Len Bias.