Sam Querrey is the 39th-ranked tennis player in the world and it is with much pride John Potter can say Querrey started his tennis career in Santa Rosa. Querrey, now 21 and living in Las Vegas, was seven when he arrived at La Cantera, the swim and tennis club tucked away among some trees off Montgomery Drive.

"His mom just wanted an outlet for Sam's energy and so she thought of letting him some tennis balls," said Potter, a teaching pro at La Cantera.

It didn't take long, Potter said, before Querrey started to show skills that separated him from not only other seven year olds but kids four or five years older.

"When it came to crucial points to be played," Potter said, "Sam just rose up to meet the challenge. He just concentrated more, became more focus. It was like he was ready for the moments. Other kids might go the other way when a game or match was on the line. Sam went the other way. Sam always was his best at crucial times. He's our claim to fame."

Querrey's family moved to Thousand Oaks in Southern California, with Querrey eventually winding up in Las Vegas. Querrey, 6-foot-6, won his first round match at Wimbledon and then lost in the second round.

After the Monday interview I had with Mike Roan, El Mo's coach, who played with McNair at Houston-Tennessee, I thought back to January, 2003, when I was in Nashville previewing the Raiders-Titans AFC title game. McNair, the Titans quarterback, spent an hour with a couple of reporters from the Bay Area and I was impressed that he did. Not that he spent an hour. That he spent a minute.

McNair was in such pain he wouldn't allow you to shake his hand. He sat through most of the interview, his back too painful. "If I stand for 15 minutes, I have to sit down," McNair said. "If I sit for 15 minutes, then I have to stand." He was too injured to pick up his four-year old son. After a Raider game in 2001 McNair had to be carried off the plane.

While all that impressed me, how someone could play with so much pain, McNair's greatest impression was this: Humility. For a superstar, the team's signature player, to act modest, is uncommon in any pro sport.

But McNair had no attitude or gripes. "I'm a country boy and you are expected to do your chores." This was his chore, to play with pain. He didn't whine. He just did his job and when I asked the Titan beat reporters if McNair was always like this, they said yes, without fail. The most mature professional they had ever dealt with.

So I wonder now, as so many other people who met McNair, how did this truly class act get so sideways in his life? I'm not sure I'll be satisfied or agree with the answer, if it ever is truly known.

I had the opportunity to sign off on a movie about the 1979 Gulf Shores incident and I asked my managing editor at The Bee, Frank McCulloch, his thoughts. I have never met a more sound and skilled newspaperman than Frank McCulloch. Of all the people I have sought for opinions in my life, Frank is at the top of the newspaper food chain.

I'll tell you a story, Frank said, and then you decide.

In the 60s Frank was the Saigon bureau chief for TIME magazine during the Vietnam War. He wrote a story for LIFE magazine on this renegade ex-U.S. Army officer living far up a delta, neither U.S. or VC. Had his own army.

About a week or so after the piece ran in LIFE, a bearded dude walked into the Saigon office and asked for Frank. His name was Francis Ford Coppola and he wanted to do a movie based on the article. Frank would get full editorial control.

The movie - "Apocalypse Now" - bore scant resemblance to the piece Frank wrote.

I knew I might be made the same promise and suffer the same result. And when I heard John Belushi was going to play me, all I thought was this: This was going to be a Saturday Night Live skit set in southern Alabama. Not to mention Belushi had his own substance-abuse problems. So whatever integrity I thought the movie might have was dispelled. Hollywood, as we all know, somehow could turn a funeral into stand-up comedy.

I hope I don't have to go another 30 years without talking to Kenny Stabler. Fact is, I would like to sit down with him now and talk at length, maybe even sign a document forbidding any public discussion. I am a curious person and I would like to know some off-the-record things. I would like to know that if he had to do it again, would he invite me to Gulf Shores?

Since the column I ran this morning several people have asked me if I think Stabler should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He shouldn't, not because he wasn't great. Stabler was a great quarterback but he wasn't great long enough. He needed superior longevity and he didn't have it and I would have voted for him if he had.

But I have truly no ill will toward him and I say that without joking. Life is too short. I know both of us have better things to do than carrying grudges against the other.

That's what Dawne Cardinalli of Santa Rosa said when she saw Ron Miller, 61, make a dive from the springboard at the Finley Aquatic Center. Cardinalli has an 11-year old daughter, Hannah, who also is a member of the Santa Rosa Diving Club.

"To me, when I see Ron," Cardinalli said, "I feel that nothing is unreachable. It is incredible what he is doing. And I think it's good for the kids on the team to see what he's doing, that as an adult he can still relate to them by diving."

Miller, who had never dove before, took up the sport a year ago. While he has yet to compete in a meet, Miller makes every practice, does every training drill.

The next oldest member on the team is Jen Meyer, the former Ursuline diving star who will dive next year for UC Davis.