BEST OF JIM MURRAY / GOLF

* On the sport: “Golf is the cruelest of sports. Like life, it’s unfair. It’s a harlot. A trollop. It leads you on. It never lives up to its promises. It’s not a sport, it’s bondage. An obsession. A boulevard of broken dreams. It plays with men. And runs off with the butcher.”

* On Ben Hogan: “The only thing that would give him away were the eyes. Gray-blue, they had a piercing quality. They were the eyes of a circling bird of prey: fearless, fierce, the pupil no more than a dot in their imperious center. They were not the eyes of a loser.”

* On Hogan, again: “Throughout the history of civilization, there have been syllables of terror handed down from generation to generation. ‘Geronimo,’ for example, could be counted on to empty one fort after another in the old West. . . . In the littler world of golf, ‘Hogan’ elicited much the same effect. Nothing could paralyze a field of golfers as much as this whispered collection of syllables. Strong men bogeyed when they heard this dreaded name. Sam Snead once said the only thing he feared on a golf course was lightning--and Ben Hogan.”

* On Hogan’s funeral: “My late wife always used to say, ‘If Jim ever gets to heaven and Ben Hogan isn’t there, he ain’t staying.’

“We all laughed. But you know something? I hope today they have in heaven this little 18-hole golf course with trouble on the right, narrow fairways, maybe a par-three with this sand trap in the middle of the green, a long par-five or two that requires a one-iron second, a finishing hole uphill against a sloping fairway to weed out the ribbon clerks and identify the champions.

“You see, I’m assuming Hogan’s there and I have this fantasy in which God is waiting for him and he says, ‘Ben! We’ve been waiting for you!’ and he shows him the course, which looks suspiciously like Riviera in 1948, and the Lord says, ‘Look, Hogan’s Alley!’ . . .

“Hogan left us the other day for greener fairways. A goodbye as he would have wanted it, without superlatives, by a man of God in his own church in Fort Worth before an audience of his contemporaries and the flower of American golf. A proper goodbye to a man who was a part of our youth, a source of our pride. A man on whom even a breath of scandal never touched, who never did an unworthy thing in his life, whose friendship was as rare as rubies.

“For what Hogan meant, it’s the old story. For those who know golf, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, no explanation is possible.”

* On Arnold Palmer:

“Arnold turned a golf round into Dempsey-Firpo. A war. He didn’t play a course. He invaded it. He looked and acted like an athlete. He was strong enough to hit a ball out of the Pacific Ocean, and did. He could go in the rough and smash a ball out of debris so thick that the ball, chunks of rock, cans, bottles, a few squirrels, tree trunks and parts of old Volkswagens would come flying out together. And most of them landed on the green.”

* On the nine-iron: “A hunk of iron perfect for any number of household uses, such as poking a fire or killing a mouse, but so programmed that it will hit a golf ball only on the top half and send it chattering, in line-drive configuration, into the nearest clump of ivy.”