I’m not sure who to write about this morning: Rory McIlroy or Andrei Chesnokov.

Andrei Chesnokov?

Let me come back to him in a minute. It is impossible to ignore McIlroy this morning given his performance on Sunday at The Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. Looking up at a leaderboard that included Phil Mickelson, Davis Love III, Angel Cabrera and Jim Furyk—to name a few—McIlroy went out on Sunday and shot 62—finishing his round with six straight 3’s—to win The Quail Hollow Championship by four shots over Mickelson and five over Cabrera.

It was a bravura performance, climaxing with a 40-foot birdie putt on 18 that was never going anywhere but the middle of the hole almost from the moment it left his putter. I just finished writing my weekly Golf Channel essay and the thing I kept coming back to wasn’t so much the brilliant golf but the absolute joy McIlroy clearly brings to the golf course.

The kid turns 21 on Tuesday, which means he’s about the same age that Tiger Woods and Mickelson were when they burst onto the scene—Mickelson by winning a tournament while still a junior in college; Woods by winning twice on tour at the end of 1996 a few months before his 21st birthday.

Woods was always a golf prodigy, a genius on the golf course—and still is in spite of his performance this past week—but one thing he never was going to be was fun. Mickelson tried a little harder. He’s always made a point of signing autographs and smiling back at people but it has never been something that has come naturally to him.

This kid has a little Arnold Palmer in him. He’s got all the shots but he’s also got a natural way of connecting with the fans that you rarely see on the golf course. A lot of players complain that it is unfair for fans to expect them to smile or acknowledge them when they’re working—which is what they’re doing on the golf course. I get that. But when a player is naturally inclined to be that way it is all the better for him, for the fans and for the game.

McIlroy walking up 18 on Sunday applauding for the fans was cool. It also was natural, not concocted in any way. Fans like him; other players like him; the media likes him and he can flat out play. If Tom Watson doesn’t win the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach next month, a McIlroy victory might be the next best thing. That’s no knock on Mickelson by the way, it would just be a fresh new story line.

Okay, onto Chesnokov. Unless you are a real tennis geek you have no idea who I’m talking about. In fact, unless you are a real tennis geek you are probably wondering why in the world tennis would be on my mind at all right now. I do keep up with the tour, at least enough to know who is winning week-to-week. This past week, the men were in Rome for what was once known as The Italian Open. Now, thanks to some marketing silliness it is called The Rome Masters or some such thing. Rafael Nadal won for, I think the sixth time.

When I was a kid, NBC used to televise The Italian Open, The French Open and Wimbledon. Only Wimbledon was actually on live, but I watched raptly anyway. Bud Collins called it, “The Old World Triple.” I still remember Vitas Gerulaitis winning The Italian one year and how big a deal it was back then.

I dreamed back then of someday doing the “Old World Triple,” in the same year. Not only did I get to do it in 1990 when I was researching, “Hard Courts,” I got to do it while hanging out with Bud a lot of the time which only made it about 1,000 times more fun. Bud believes he is part-Italian and traveling around Rome with him was a little bit like being with Vito Corleone at Connie’s wedding—except Luca Brasi was nowhere in sight.

My fondest memories of that week in Rome though center on Chesnokov—who liked to be called Chezzy. He was then a solid clay court player, the first really good player to come out of the Soviet Union in years. He liked to pretend he didn’t speak much English but in truth he spoke it about as well as I did. He and Natalia Zvereva were in a battle back then with the Soviet Tennis Federation about purses. The federation was getting about 90 percent of the money they were making on tour. Chezzy and Zvereva didn’t see that as fair.

It took a while for me to get Chezzy to trust me—which was understandable. At first when I told him I was writing a book on life on the tennis tour, he was suspicious. “Why do you want to talk to me?” he asked. “I never win anything important.”

He never did win a major, but he had beaten Mats Wilander at The French in 1986—the first time I encountered him—and had been in the French semis in 1989, losing in four sets to Michael Chang. He won at Monte Carlo in 1990 and made it to the Italian final a couple of weeks later. What was amazing was HOW he made it to the final. He kept losing the first set, falling behind in the second and then rallying—somehow—to win. The matches took longer and longer--Chezzy was a classic stay-back clay-courter who simply wore you down—but he kept winning.

Every time he was asked in a press conference what he was going to do to get ready for his next match he would smile and say, “I go to disco.”

He was joking. He was very serious about his tennis, but not about much else. When I finally got him to sit down and talk to me over a long breakfast that week, he talked in detail about how he had fallen in love with the game as a kid and had known early on that it was his ticket out of a rudimentary job in Moscow.

“I know this because of the Olympics,” he said. “Once they say tennis will be in Olympics (1988) I know the government will put serious money into the tennis programs and I will have a chance. If not for the Olympics, they don’t let us travel to compete.”

I like to think that Chezzy and I found common ground that year. He became one of the non-star stars of “Hard Courts,” much the same way Paul Goydos did in “A Good Walk Spoiled.” Unlike with Goydos, who I am still friends with and see all the time on tour, I haven’t seen Chezzy for years. There aren’t that many people I’d like to sit down with at length again from my years covering tennis, but Chezzy would be right near the top of that short list.

He was a very good player. And a better guy, though I doubt he ever did see the inside of a disco.

During my annual visit to the U.S. Open on Wednesday I encountered an old friend who asked if I had seen any of the ceremony honoring Andre Agassi or had watched during the telecast when he spent some time in the booth talking about his career and the state of the game today.

I said I hadn't done either but that someone had told me Agassi had been critical of today's players for not being more media and fan friendly. Needless to say I found that ironic since Agassi spent a good deal of his career ducking the media at every turn. It was only when his Image is Everything image started to lose some of it's luster that he started inviting reporters to visit him in Las Vegas and letting them drive one of his cars so they would think he was a good guy. (It wasn't me, it was a colleague at the old National Sports Daily.)

I bring this up not to rip Agassi, who did grow gracefully into tennis old age and was probably as popular with fans--in large part because of the work done by his image-makers--as anyone. I do remember his tearful farewell speech after he lost at the Open three years ago during which someone who knew him well turned to me and said, "I guarantee you the place where he starts to cry is written into the script."

Okay, maybe I am bashing him a little, I have too many memories of him refusing to be interviewed by Mary Carillo because she asked 'tough,' questions (he insisted on Cliff Drysdale who thought, 'great playing today Andre,' was a tough question) or of the day in Vienna when he was practicing for a Davis Cup match and asked Bud Collins to hit with him for a while. "You're the tennis expert, let's see how you play," Agassi said. Bud had not, in the view of Team Andre, exalted him the way he expected to be exalted. Bud, in case you don't know it, was a very good player once upon a time, won a national mixed doubles title in the 60s. He was 62 on the day in question and facing hip replacement surgery. Agassi was 21.

Agassi hit a few easy balls at Bud and was surprised when they came right back at him. It's easy to tell someone who knows how to play the game very quickly, there's a fluidity to the way they swing the racquet.

Agassi picked up the pace and Bud stayed with him. Finally, clearly frustrated that he hadn't been able to humiliate Bud, Agassi took a short ball and hit it as hard as he could right AT Bud. Bad hip and all, Bud managed to dodge it. He put down the racquet and said quietly, "I think that's enough for today Andre."

Actually I started out to write this about athletes who want to say hello when it's time to say goodbye. All of a sudden, as their careers come to a close, they decide the media isn't so bad--in fact, they decide that being IN the media is a pretty good idea. Agassi hasn't done that, he's done a lot of very good charitable work along with his wife Steffi Graf, but he still loves the spotlight--which is fine. Having said that, I think I'd rather write more about Bud Collins than about people like Steve Carlton who talked to no one when he was winning Cy Young Awards and then held press conferences when his ERA with the Twins was well over five runs a game. Or about Sterling Sharpe, who never talked to the media as a player but was happy to take ESPN's money when he retired. Not to mention my old pal Mr. Television, Bob Knight.

You see, Bud Collins is one of the great men in the history of the planet. More than 40 years ago he was the first newspaper guy to crossover and do TV and he did both so well for so long that he is still writing for The Boston Globe today. Wednesday, he was scurrying around at The Open (at 81) doing a spot for ESPN, checking out various matches and--as always--taking time to answer questions from young reporters.

I first met Bud at the 1980 U.S. Open when I was sent up the last four days to write sidebars and caddy for the late, great Barry Lorge, who was then The Washington Post's tennis writer. Barry introduced me to Bud, who instantly told me he was fan of my work--stealing what was supposed to be my line. I had first watched Bud do tennis on TV in the late 1960s when the local PBS TV station in Boston began televising what was then the U.S. Pro Championships from Longwood. I'd been reading him whenever I could get a Globe for as long as I could remember.

On Friday afternoon, I was writing a story about Chris Evert's upset--and it was an upset at the time--of defending champion Tracy Austin. The men's doubles finals was going on (in those days they played the doubles in-between the women's semis) and I heard The Globe's phone ringing. Bud was outside the press box watching the doubles, so I picked up the phone to take a message.
When I told the guy that Bud wasn't there and I'd take a message, he said, 'look, is there anyway you can find him, this is Abby Hoffman calling."

Yeah right, I thought. Abby Hoffman had just gotten out of jail, which was front page news. This was only twelve years after the Chicago Seven became famous and his name was still a notorious one. "I'm serious," the guy said. "Please try to find him."

For some reason, I believed him just enough to put the phone down and go find Bud. "There's a guy on your phone claiming to be Abby Hoffman," I said.

"Oh he probably wants tickets," Bud said as if I had told him his next door neighbor was on the phone.

He was right. Free from jail, Hoffman wanted to come to the Open that weekend. It was only later that I found out Bud had coached Hoffman at Brandeis.

Bud has lived an extraordinary life. He has traveled the world and made more friends and helped more journalists than you can count. He has twice lost wives to cancer and his sister and brother-in-law, who ran a drug rehab center, were murdered in their sleep by a former patient who had come back to try and 'free' his girlfriend. Through all that tragedy he has never lost his zest for life or his willingness to help out or his love of tennis or people. Even Dick Enberg, who partnered with Bud on NBC for years, once expressed amazement at his patience with the people in tennis.

"How in the world do you stay so enthusiastic when you have to deal with these guys every single day?" he asked.

When I first started covering tennis, it was Bud who introduced me to people, Bud who sneaked me into the off-limits players tea room at Wimbledon and Bud who kept telling me that I needed to hang in there and cover the sport no matter how frustrating it became. I still remember him cheering me up when one of my first tennis interviews went horribly wrong in 1985.

Gabriela Sabatini was a rising star back then, just 15, but quite beautiful and ranked in the top ten in the world. I jumped through about 47 hoops at The French Open and was finally granted a 20 minute interview with her in the player's lounge following a match. I knew she didn't speak a lot of English and I didn't speak very much Spanish so I needed an icebreaker question, something to relax her a little bit. Finally, I hit on it; Sabatini had made her pro debut the previous fall at the U.S. Open and had reached the third round. The USTA had brought her into the interview room after her loss and she had been shy and sweet. Someone asked what she would do with the $8,000 she had won for making the third round.

"My parents just bought me a little dog," she said. "I will buy him a present."

Aha, I thought, I'll ask what she bought the dog.

So I did. The minute the question was out of my mouth, I knew I'd made a horrible mistake. Sabatini burst into tears. "The dog," she said, choking out the words, "the dog died."

So there I sat with this 15-year-old kid with people scurrying over demanding to know what I had done to make her cry. It was all I could to keep from crying myself.

When I told Bud the story he laughed and said it was time to go get a glass of wine--which wasn't hard to do in Paris.

On Wednesday I reminded him that I often said he liked people so much that he would have found something good to say about Mussolini.

Bud shrugged. "Well," he said. "The guy did play tennis."