Toledo Blade

DUBLIN, Ohio -- Steve Stricker was named the PGA Tour's comeback player of the year. Twice, in fact. In successive years. Have you ever heard of such a thing in any sport?

"What I've always said is that it shows you how far down in a hole I was to win it twice," he said with a smile.

The hole was dug between 1999 and 2005, when Stricker managed just one win and a mere dozen top-10 finishes. In those seven years, he clipped the $1 million mark in earnings -- which used to be a magic figure, but has become rather mundane -- just one time. Steve Stricker, frankly, had become just another pro golfer, a good round now and again, a nonfactor on Sundays, a super nice guy with a nice swing, nothing more and nothing less.

As a concept, paying college athletes is OK by me.

It's a sad commentary that Ohio State football produces the lion's share of funding for some 35 other sports, that coach Jim Tressel earns $3.5 million annually to orchestrate it, but that some of the players who make it all possible have to sell their trinkets to pay for tattoos and gas money.

A frazzled mother on a crowded flight tries to coax a screaming baby to sleep as surrounding passengers stare -- some in empathy, some in barely disguised annoyance. When the child doesn't calm down, the parent discreetly pulls a bottle of children's Benadryl from a diaper bag and administers a small dose.

Surveys and parental testimonials suggest that this scene is repeated every day in the skies over America and in other settings.

But the use of the antihistamine, known generically as diphenhydramine, to sedate babies is controversial, with at least one study suggesting it is a form of child abuse.