Free Life Its Ownself by Dan Jenkins

you're discussing the socioeconomic backgrounds and behavior characteristics of your fellow athletes."
    Barbara Jane was delighted with the news that I had taken the color job with CBS.
    "You'll like the grownup world," she said on the phone from California. "What did you think of the new head of CBS Sports? It's fantastic he came to see you personally. They usually send a drone."
    "He's just another TV guy, as far as I can tell," I said. "Throw a Ping-Pong ball in a boxcar and you've got a Richard Marks."

FOUR
    T.J. Lambert said he would fold me up like a taco if I didn't stop in Fort Worth on my way out to the Coast to join Barbara Jane.
    He demanded I be on hand for TCU's home opener against the feared Rice Owls. Rice was the only school in the Southwest Conference with a worse football record than TCU over the previous twenty years.
    A week had gone by and I was out of the hospital.
    The cast on my right leg reached from mid-thigh to the ankle and made my leg look like a parenthesis, but I could get a pant leg over it. I was on crutches, but I could hop around without them if I could grab on to things. And I could drive a car.
    I rented a Lincoln from Budget at the D/FW airport and pointed it west on a freeway. The skyline of Fort Worth sprang up and loomed ahead of me, taller and fatter than ever, and I marveled at how my old hometown was beginning to resemble Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, all of those cities that were striving to become a bigger Dallas.
    Certain cities would always have their own look, their own feel. New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., part of L.A., Chicago below the skyscrapers, even a Jacksonville, Florida. But all other cities in my mind were starting to look alike, think alike, live alike.
    Take the snow out of Minneapolis and you had Phoenix. Take the cactus out of Phoenix and you had Denver. Take the crab cakes out of Baltimore and you had Kansas City. Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta were the worst examples of progress. They were already Freeway Heaven, cities intent on linking high-rise suburbs to new shopping villages to new country clubs with condos. Cities where people in the future were only going to communicate by word processor or over strawberry Margaritas at Happy Hour.
    Now it was slowly happening to Fort Worth, once the world headquarters for white socks, Western music, and Tex-Mex food, an honest town where a man wasn't considered drunk unless he was lying down in a livestock pen and couldn't speak his native language.
    Fort Worth was giving birth to clusters of those steel- and-glass towers of its own, needles rising among boxes of reflective glass, and its suburbs were starting to crawl with eateries overdosed in blond bentwood furniture and imitation Tiffany lampshades.
    For some, a rowdy night out in Fort Worth was still a fistfight, a two-step, and a high school football game. But for most guys it was an inane conversation with a racy receptionist while a hot stock tip was passed across a platter of plastic nachos at Mommie's Trust Fund, the newest singles bar in town.
    Prairie geography was responsible, I was convinced. Fort Worth was the same size and had the same lack of pretension of a Jacksonville, but it didn't have an Atlantic Ocean, a St. Johns River and an intracoastal canal to keep the land developers from shredding every outlying oak into mortgage paper.
    Fort Worth seemed as determined as Atlanta to imitate Dallas. One day soon, if the planners had their way, everybody in Fort Worth could step gingerly into a restaurant specializing in fern salads and carrot boats.
    Although I was surrounded by modern architectural wonders as I motored through downtown, one thing had yet to change. There weren't any people around. It wasn't a bomb scare, it was just Fort Worth. The rich folks were as cloistered as ever, and the people I did see were either bent over from age or had dents in their foreheads and prison haircuts.
    I dropped off my bags at the Hyatt Regency and