Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me. It restored my faith when I was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I was a young man the ba….

In Manhasset you were either Yankees or Mets, rich or poor, sober or drunk...You were 'Gaelic' or 'garlic," as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn't….

Beer is amazing. Nutritional. Medicinal. A beverage, but also a meal..

The greatest players use anger as fuel. Michael Jordan played every night with something like road rage..

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death..

To be a man, a boy must see a man.

While I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas..

Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for….

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up wit….

Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown..

I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white ….

If only Ed Fleming had a mother who gave such sound advice. The manager of Wazoo's, a downtown Denver restaurant, Fleming is a CSU alum who has been ….

Of course many bars in Manhasset, like bars everywhere, were nasty places, full of pickled people marinating in regret..

It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower. You will look back on this time and remember remarkably little of ….

Some of football's gaudiest displays of manliness are purely aesthetic. It's not what players do, it's how they look doing it..

History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go..

While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces u….

I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry.

Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best..