Too much mustard

Rock knew at once that his wedge shot had gotten away from him. He looked up to see it fly over the top of his house and into the backyard. "I put a little too much mustard on that one," he said.
Rock was with Tommy Smith, a friend he'd known since his radio days thirty years earlier.
"A little?" Smith said.
They both laughed. "Fuck," Rock said. "I was trying to hit it twenty feet."
Rock later found the ball on the flat end of a small vertical branch he had once trimmed. It was at least fifteen feet off the ground and perched on a surface roughly the size of a quarter. The result was so improbable that he couldn't get anyone to bother to look for themselves, not even Smith.

Undefeated

It was one of those stories Rock occasionally stumbled upon that demanded a detailed explanation. In this case, there was a high school near the Arkansas State Fairgrounds, in Little Rock's most impoverished district, that fielded a boys basketball team that had never lost a game.
Rock met the team's coach in a small makeshift, cluttered office just off Roosevelt Boulevard. It was built into an old, grubby minimart, with malnourished men and forty-ounce bottles of beer gathered together in the parking lot. He sat on a clipboard someone had placed across a dormant, rusted radiator heater as the coach spoke of the previous night's game, a lopsided victory over a school Rock had never heard of.
"One of our guys scored a hundred and forty points," the coach said.

A city of significance

It was Rock's second shift at the nuclear power plant control site. During his first, no one there knew where the plant was, but this time his coworkers seemed and appeared far more expert. A man in a white lab coat told him the facility they controlled was located in Columbus, Ireland.
Rock had never heard of Columbus, Ireland, but he could tell from aerial photographs on display in the office that it was a city of significance. He was particularly impressed by photos of the sprawling, massive plant.

The enormous bird

An eagle had just flown into the den of the Aikman's house in Russellville. Rock was there with several members of his extended family, including his Uncle Jim, who was in the middle of an NFL game as a linebacker. In fact, Jim had just run up the stairs in pursuit of the opposing quarterback when the enormous bird flew in.

It had typical moose-like antlers common to bald eagles, one of which Rock took hold of to begin his attempt to extract it. The eagle struggled mightily to free itself, but Rock managed to avoid its sharp claws as he carried it toward the back door.

Registration

The crowd of sportswriters, fans, and conference officials reminded Rock of race-day registration on the morning of significant marathons. He was there with hundreds of reporters to get his credentials for the Southeastern Conference basketball tournament already underway. The problem was, he didn't know how to get to the arena and no one there could help him. He wandered through the excited, energetic throng and couldn't find directions anywhere.