Sports & Recreation

You don't have to like gambling to enjoy Dollar Days at Lone Star Park. You don't even have to like horses, really. You just have to be able to enjoy the incredible fact that you can get into a fun and relaxed entertainment venue for a buck. It also helps if you appreciate a bottomless supply of hot dogs and ice-cold beer, which are also $1. After the third or fourth, you won't even notice that it's Miller Lite.

Here's a testament to the power of The Little Ticket: At least one of us at the Observer didn't give a rat's ass about sports until one day more than a decade ago when, bored with the blandness of Clear Channel-dominated music radio, we scanned through the AM frequencies and stopped at what sounded like a half-dozen smartasses talking at once, riffing and one-upping each other on jokes about that date's celebrity birthdays. That segment, "Why Today Doesn't Suck," the daily passing of the baton from lunchtime show BaD Radio to afternoon drive's The Hardline, was chaotic and hilarious then and still is today, even if Line Four Guy is seldom heard lately. We came for the bawdy guy talk and stayed for the hot sports opinions, which range from half-baked to insightful but are always entertaining to hear.

These days, it seems like everything awesome is happening in Oak Cliff. Restaurants, bars, entertainment venues; it's all there. Add golf to that list as well, with Stevens Park Golf Course embracing the effortless cool of the city's southern tip. A couple years ago, an $8 million overhaul was done on the course to shake it out of a dormant funk, and the result is majestic. Try your hardest not to stand slack-jawed as you play the 15th hole, with the Dallas skyline teasing your focus away as you hook a drive straight into a clump of trees. Go ahead and hit another, we won't tell anybody.

With the traditional outdoor batting cage slowly fading away from our landscape, one joint has the balls and bats to take things to the next level. D-Bat in Addison offers a slew of indoor cages where you can slug to your heart's content. The rates are pretty cheap and the baseballs are the real deal, so you can do your best one-kneed Adrian Beltre impression without laying down the suicide squeeze on your wallet. They even offer lessons, so if your swing game isn't what it used to be, you'll no longer have to suffer the furtive giggles of vicious packs of 8-year olds.

There are dozens of ways to enjoy the serene expanse of White Rock Lake, but one of the best is renting a kayak from White Rock Paddle Co. and taking it for a spin on the water. Challenge a private-school crew team to a sprint or just go for a leisurely aqua trek by The Bath House Cultural Center, Filter Building or 4009 W. Lawther Drive, better known as the Mount Vernon replica estate. If you take a camera with you, shell out an extra couple bucks for a dry bag. It could save you big time if your boat gets a little tippy.

Here in the city, it's easy to forget there are places within a short drive that are green, quiet and wild. Roughly half an hour from downtown, Cedar Ridge Preserve is 600 acres of pristine hills shot through with some nine miles of surface trails and occasionally challenging terrain. It's densely thicketed with cedar and some huge red oaks. The trail opens up at times on gorgeous vistas of heavily wooded hills and a gleaming Joe Pool Lake. Nobody charges you to get in, but let your innate altruism rule. Give what you can to the maintenance of the preserve.

The toss-'em-in-and-let-'em-figure-it-out method of swimming instruction, while appealingly free, is ineffective for many children. That's why swimming lessons exist, and you'll be hard-pressed to find someplace better at coaxing your young child out of his beloved Thomas the Tank Engine shirt and into swimming proficiency. The classes are small, with three kids per teacher, each of whom demonstrates a level of patience the awe-struck parents can only dream of.

Delonte West was, for a time, the most interesting man in professional basketball. He was the anti-star — a dogged defender, an able ball handler and an often clutch outside shooter who compensated for his lack of physical size and God-given talent by busting his ass during every second of court time he got. He brought depth and experience to the Mavs' bench, and he brought it on the cheap. But he brought something else too. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, West was real. He talked about his struggles with bipolar disorder. During at least one offseason, he worked construction. But it's his sense of humor we'll miss. His Twitter handle, @CharleeRedz13, was a strange and hilarious window into the mind of a man who once told an ESPN reporter at the Dallas Zoo that he'd just given birth to a baby cheetah. His delightful weirdness may also have had a dark side. The Mavs waived his contract following a still dimly understood "outburst" in the locker room. He finished a lackluster season with the Texas Legends. There are rumors that the Knicks and the Grizzlies are looking at him, but there is no chance that he'll ever don a Mavs' uniform again, and that just makes us sad.

We'll probably never know exactly what happened in July 2012, when Angela Bryant, mother of the Dallas Cowboys' prodigiously talented wide receiver, told DeSoto police that she'd been assaulted by her son and then later recanted. Since then, however, he's given Cowboys fans reason to hope he's turned over a new leaf. He's now gone more than a year, including the entire offseason, without wading into trouble. During the same period, he emerged as a budding superstar. Whether this is the result of a newfound maturity or just extremely attentive handlers isn't terribly important, as long as it keeps him from being stupid.

Those harmless-looking older folks sitting in folding chairs somewhere around the lake? Yeah, all their "free advice" is about Jesus. If you're not careful, they'll try to pray the demons right out of you, and then what will you be left with? Lately they've taken to hanging out near the Porta-Pottys and buttonholing people who just have to pee, which is pretty low.

You thought you knew how to picnic until you visited the Dallas Arboretum. No other swath of greenery boasts more professional picnickers per square foot. Come to think of it, no other spot in Dallas offers this much greenery or natural beauty. No wonder so many people commit an afternoon here, grazing al fresco while sitting on Grandmother's heirloom quilt. You could bring a couple of sandwiches and some sodas from the convenience store, but you will be made to feel very small. Here, the picnic baskets are the size of Volvos and everyone worth their weight brings wine. Sandwiches are for sissies, and spreads look like the buffet tables filled with exceptional food. And why not picnic here? Even on the most crowded days it's not hard to find a space — a small square of greenery where you can sit and relax and ponder finer things.

The welterweight division is perhaps the most talent-stacked division in Ultimate Fighting Championship, the biggest show in town when it comes to mixed martial arts. And the next challenger to that division's long-time champion, Georges St-Pierre, makes his home here in North Texas, in humble Mansfield. Former NCAA champion wrestler Hendricks packs the strength of a heavyweight into a 5-foot-9-inch, 170-pound frame and throws a deceptively strong left that knocks out iron-chinned men with seemingly no effort. "Bigg Rigg" Hendricks claims he's never gone harder than 80 percent in a pro fight, but promises to push it to 100 for his November 16 title fight against GSP at UFC 167. Will that extra 20 percent be enough to overcome his underdog status? We're certainly not betting against him.

Since it opened a year ago, the new 5.2-acre deck park over the freeway at the north end of downtown has become a lot of things to a lot of people, from quiet refuge to raucous meeting ground, but it has also offered one thing Dallas really didn't have before: a place where everybody gets along. It may be a flyspeck in size next to Grant Park in Chicago or Central Park in New York, but like those other truly great urban parks Klyde Warren is a place of peace and reconciliation, where all of the city's residents can feel welcomed and at ease with each other. Built to connect two sides of a freeway, it binds together much more than that already.

It takes a long time to become Dale Hansen, 30 years in fact. That's how long the bombastic, wisecracking dean of Dallas sportscasters has been doing his shtick at WFAA Channel 8, a career that has produced a million one-liners, like his description of Mark Cuban as Son of Frankenstein: "If he just had a couple of bolts stuck in his neck, you couldn't tell 'em apart." But every once in a while he slips and reveals a mordant serious side beneath that amusing surface, like two years ago when he tongue-lashed his own station for airing a surreptitious ambush video of one of his frequent sparring partners, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, acting the fool in a bar. Who can get away with that? Dale Hansen. That's pretty much the list.

Two boat clubs and ample public launching facilities keep White Rock lake full of sails in fair weather, and the weather is fair enough for sailing for at least a few days in all but the hottest months of the year. Both clubs host regattas, races and training exercises, so on a good weekend day you're likely to see white sails and colorful spinnakers (the big sails that look like hot air balloons) up and down the lake. The best thing is that all of these boats are contained within about one and a half square miles of water, all of it surrounded by park and picnic area, so the sails are never too far away to watch. It makes a romantic background for an outing, and, who knows? One of them might even tip over.

This summer, the city of Dallas opened a pavilion and amphitheater at a revamped Moore Park, which sits on the western end of the Santa Fe Trestle Trail. It's a nice enough addition, not enough to lure many bikes or pedestrians but a far sight better than the scrap yards and rundown gas stations that anchor its downtown side three quarters of a mile away. The renovated railroad bridge is the first way across the Trinity River that's not a road, but it's too out of the way to be a particularly useful crossing. What it does offer is a close-to-downtown glimpse of the Trinity in a semi-natural state, with trees and birds and nary a drop of pig's blood.

There was a time, years ago, before 8-foot-long hot dogs and nachos in plastic pink helmets, when a Rangers playoff run was a fleeting wish. These days, thanks to the wild gesticulation and inspiring attitude of Ron Washington, it's an expected reality. With every single member of his starting rotation spending time on the DL this year and a late-season collapse, Washington's greatest feat may still lie ahead of him. But he's still the best we've got.

One of the greatest developments in our city over the past year has been the public's instant love affair with Klyde Warren Park. Its free outdoor gaming area offers easily the finest table tennis for miles. Since the park is so new and its namesake is so young, pingpong is the ideal fit. We're excited for about a decade down the road, though, when 21-year-old human Klyde ditches the paddles and hits the One Arts 7-Eleven for a case of Natty Light. "Beer pong at Me Park, brahs!"

Though not a columnist in the traditional sense, there are few who provide as much depth and pour as much into their subject matter as Jamey Newberg, who covers the Texas Rangers with amazing aplomb when his lawyerly pursuits become tiresome. Newberg, who's built his subscriber empire on the strength of his quasi-daily email blasts and annual bound Rangers preseason reports, lends the perfect voice to the ups and downs of the long baseball season. He echoes the frustrations when the team is down and the enthusiasm when they're rolling, always injecting his own brand of levity and an untainted appreciation for the beauty of the game of baseball.

There are tons of the traditional driving ranges around, but none of them are nearly as fun as Top Golf. This two-story golf-meets-darts dream complex gives the Happy Gilmore in all of us the chance to hate-shank golf balls into the giant targets in the fairway. There's even live music and themed parties to keep people hanging around after they've blown through their high-tech range balls. Who would have thought that combining leisurely golf swings with booze and food would be so enjoyable?

Our readers' pick for best gun range, DFW Gun Range, was still renovating after a fire in February, though an employee told us it will be up and running again come November. In the meantime, if you have the hankering to go pepper something, you might try our favorite shooting spot, Elm Fork Shooting Sports, on Luna Road off Northwest Highway. We've checked out a few indoor ranges in the area — we may be pinkos here at the Observer, but some of us are armed pinkos — and have generally found all the places to be well-stocked, about equal in price and staffed by friendly, helpful people. Elm Fork gets our pick not for what it has, but what it lacks: a roof. While shooting indoors is great if you want to avoid rain, cold or sunstroke, if you're like us (cheap, not very good with guns) and prefer to simply do a little plinking with a .22, shooting outdoors lets you avoid the hard, concussive pounding that comes from shooting in confined spaces next to some guy blasting away with a hand cannon. And let's be honest, it's a little intimidating to be in a room full of marksmen with .45s while you're holding a puny little .22. Our Freudian issues aside, Elm Fork also offers a fun mix of steel and paper targets, tactical ranges, skeet and trap shooting, plus a full schedule of gun classes.

A British native on our staff remarked recently that he found the notion of a sporting goods store displaying a live rattlesnake in a glass box to be "ridiculous." We set immigration on him, of course, because as any good Texan knows, a sporting goods store with a live rattler, a 30,000-gallon fish tank loaded with native species, a waterfall, a showroom filled with fishing boats and enough guns and ammo on sale to stock an army (or a small Texas town) is, in fact, awesome. That's what Bass Pro is. Sure, you won't find any bikes or bats or soccer balls here, but that's why God gave us Walmart. Bass Pro is a true sportsman's paradise, loaded with every possible combination of rod, reel, boat, gun, deer feeder, boots and clothing that a real sunburned, hog-shooting, bass-catching, duck-hunting Lone Star sumbitch could want.

We all love Texas Rangers shortstop Elvis Andrus, but few of us express that love with the eloquence of KTCK-AM 1310 The Ticket personality Sean Bass. @sbass1310 is a must-follow for Rangers fans during games, especially when Andrus is on a streak. "Elvis Andrus is the satisfaction a man feels after building a deck with his father over the first pleasant weekend of the spring," he might write. Or, "Elvis is like a full trot line after a hearty campfire breakfast. Coleman griddle." Bass' man-crush and his flowery descriptions of it are like an unexpected blossom of literacy in a field of scraggly statistics and overgrown bloviation. Hashtag Elvisball.

Another must-follow during baseball season is @tweetgrubes, if for nothing other than the nicknames he comes up with for Texas Rangers. Sometimes they're obscure (Josh Lindblom is "Nirvana," because his last name kinda sounds like "In Bloom"), sometimes they're dirty (Jurickson Profar is "Circle Jurickson") and sometimes they hilariously nail a player's appearance — Lance "Lake Dad" Berkman indeed looks like he should be looking over his shoulder to see if his water-skiing kid let go of the tow rope yet. A few other favorites: "Cirque Du Soria," "Kitten Face," "Perez Dispenser" and "Church Dad" (though "Cameron" is equally acceptable for David Murphy, who definitely looks like he could be palling around with Ferris Bueller).

Extreme nerds need to be bribed to work out at a gym. We need dark lighting so that nobody talks to us or smirks at our dirty Converses. We want it heavily air conditioned, too. Oh, and if you could project films on a big screen we'd be super into that. Basically, we want to jog in a cool, dark, judgment-free movie theater. Behold: Cardio Cinema. When you take the initial tour at Gold's Uptown, very little is mentioned about Cardio Cinema, and that undersell is why it's fantastic. The theater inside a gym is filled with treadmills, elliptical trainers and stationary bikes, but very few people use the thing and the dedicated tribe that does abides by an unspoken code of no talking. Plus, Gold's has a deal in which they show films that aren't quite on video yet and the selection rotates daily, so if you push yourself to jog an extra 10 minutes, you can finally hop into conversations about big budget release junk you'd otherwise know nothing about. It's basically perfect.

It isn't much to look at. The roof leaks, the interior is decorated with faded, autographed fight posters and a huge stained Mexican flag, and the sparring ring appears to be made entirely of duct tape. The workouts are throwbacks from a previous century, just running, shadow-boxing, skipping, jumping rope and hitting the heavy, double-end and speed bags. And if you want attention from a coach, you have to show some real dedication. But for $30 a month, follow Gene Vivero's cycle and you'll be in fighting shape in no time, whether you intend to become one of his many fighters representing at local and national Golden Gloves tournaments or just want to get in shape and aren't into the whole low-impact workout thing.

You don't have to be a birder to enjoy Audubon center. After paying a small fee, all you need for a lovely, quiet, relaxing afternoon hike are a bottle of water, a decent pair of shoes and an appreciation for the great outdoors. The 205-acre forest offers a 1.1-mile trail that includes some hilly but manageable terrain and a wheelchair-accessible canyon floor trail that's a half-mile round trip through an ecosystem featuring a stand of flowering dogwoods unique to North Texas. It's 16 miles from downtown, just close enough and far enough for a spur-of-the-moment escape.

There wasn't much competition for the best bike ride in the city, to be honest. Riding on two wheels here is mostly an adrenaline-fueled game of dodge the angry truck. But the path around White Rock Lake, continuing onto the Sante Fe Trail down to Deep Ellum, could compete with those of many metropolises with functioning recycling programs. The scenery around the lake is truly the best you'll find in the city limits, with possible stops along the way at the Arboretum and any number of the excellent bars and restaurants that border it (Goodfriend Beer Garden and Burger House and Cane Rosso come to mind). And the Sante Fe Trail offers a couple miles of actual wooded seclusion before taking you through East Dallas and down to Deep Ellum, the only neighborhood in Dallas where absolutely no one will look twice if you walk into a bar covered in sweat.

There wasn't much competition for the best bike ride in the city, to be honest. Riding on two wheels here is mostly an adrenaline-fueled game of dodge the angry truck. But the path around White Rock Lake, continuing onto the Sante Fe Trail down to Deep Ellum, could compete with those of many metropolises with functioning recycling programs. The scenery around the lake is truly the best you'll find in the city limits, with possible stops along the way at the Arboretum and any number of the excellent bars and restaurants that border it (Goodfriend Beer Garden and Burger House and Cane Rosso come to mind). And the Sante Fe Trail offers a couple miles of actual wooded seclusion before taking you through East Dallas and down to Deep Ellum, the only neighborhood in Dallas where absolutely no one will look twice if you walk into a bar covered in sweat.

Free tennis courts are great. On a drive through any Dallas neighborhood, you're likely to happen upon several pairs of them, as they dot our city like rectangular freckles. That said, there's no worse feeling than getting all dressed up for tennis and pulling up to a full tennis court. Hitting a ball against the fence just doesn't cut it when you're waiting your turn to play. Not so at Cole Park in Uptown. Eight good courts make for little to no wait, and at less than a mile from the Katy Trail, these courts also make for a tidy stop-off from a jog or bike ride. Plus, the courts are lit for the types who like to take their tennis parties into the wee hours.