POWER OF THE PRESS.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Somebody with just enough brains to hold a radio microphone upright told Fred Couples on Sunday that ``the press'' says he's too old to be competitive week-to-week on the PGA Tour, then asked if his strong fourth- place showing in Nissan Open proved the writers wrong.

``I'm not competitive week-to-week,'' Couples replied. ``They're probably correct.''

Couples went on to say he's had his disagreements with reporters but ``they're usually right.''

Thank you, Freddie, for the highest praise we sportswriters have ever heard.

Hope you find the rest of this usually right.

-- The United States has been disappointed with our showing in the Winter Olympics, and many of our best golfers were outplayed by South African Rory Sabbatini in the Nissan Open. But let's not get too down in the dumps. We did pretty well in the Daytona 500.

-- Congratulations to Jimmy Johnson on becoming NASCAR's Barry Bonds.

-- I always used to wonder how many years would have to go by before UCLA basketball fans no longer held their team and coach up to the standards of the John Wooden era.

-- The NBA All-Star Game is sometime soon, isn't it?

-- Shaquille O'Neal is hinting he'd like to be a general manager someday, which is fine, unless GM Shaq would have given Laker Shaq the contract extension he was looking for.

-- The Lakers are in trouble if they don't win at least five times in the run of seven games that begins tonight at home against Portland and which includes six games against opponents who are a combined 64 games under .500.

-- Watched a little of the U.S. Open of bowling Sunday. The play-by-play man called one of the bowlers ``underrated.'' How a bowler can be underrated or overrated is beyond me. You can tell precisely how good a bowler is by his average, his cholesterol count and his Motel 6 points.

-- Bert Sugar, the ring journalist, has a new book called ``Boxing's Greatest Fighters.'' Not that the title sounds redundant, but I'm saving my cash for ``Wedding Photography's Greatest Fighters'' or ``Boxing's Greatest Horticulturalists.''

-- A crowd reported at more than 38,000 showed up for the final round of the Nissan Open on Sunday, even though Tiger Woods withdrew on Saturday. I think interest in golf as a spectator sport is vastly overestimated, but 38,000 is 38,000.

-- Great column by the Washington Post's Michael Wilbon over the weekend noting that, for the fifth time in eight years, the NBA All-Star Game featured not a single U.S.-born white player. It's the flip side of baseball's decline in participation by African-American players.

-- If integrating the Olympics' speed-skating medal stand is a big deal, then we're doing better in the diversity drive than I thought.

-- They rode the first stage of the Tour of California on Monday in Santa Rosa. I watched a bicycle race go by once in England. Most exciting 2.4 seconds in sports.

-- Lynn Swann's chances of being elected governor in Pennsylvania are improving. Dick Cheney just shot a hunting partner. Seems to me that athletes do better in politics (think Jack Kemp, Jim Bunning, Steve Largent, Arnold Schwarzenegger) than politicians do in sports (think Gerald Ford spraying galleries with golf balls, Jimmy Carter fighting off an attacking rabbit while fishing, Bill Clinton hurting his knee at Greg Norman's house).

-- I'm taking gun-safety lessons from Dick Cheney, right after I take a safe-driving course from Tony Stewart.

-- Saul Arias, a little-known jockey at Santa Anita, rode winners paying $81.60 and $183.20 in back-to-back races Monday. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in a horse-racing column that Arias is one of the jockeys who pop up with a lot of long shots. To answer your question: No, I did not win a single penny.

-- Anyway, Saul Arias for Congress.

-- Bob Lewis, the two-time Kentucky Derby-winning owner who died last week, was honored Monday with a winner's circle ceremony at Santa Anita. D. Wayne Lukas correctly called Lewis and his wife Beverly ``ambassadors of the sport,'' and Bob Baffert rightly called for a Lewis statue in the Santa Anita paddock gardens.

-- Despite fears the Betzky scandal would damage hockey's popularity, as many people as ever watched NHL hockey games over the weekend.

-- As long as we're talking about sports' popularity: I haven't thought this through all the way, but maybe the reason ``American Idol'' gets higher ratings than big sports events is that big sports events aren't as big as those of us in the athletic cocoon tend to believe. There are a lot of non-sports fans out there. That's a huge pool for reality TV to draw from.

-- Curt Gowdy died Monday. I'm sure Gowdy didn't really call the play-by-play of every important baseball and football game of the 1960s and '70s, but it sure seems like it.

-- My favorite story of spring training so far was Tony Jackson's item in the Daily News on Nomar Garciaparra's search for a comfortable first-baseman's mitt. Just because it was a baseball story about baseball. A few years ago, when Adrian Beltre's contract was the topic in Vero Beach, I swear we went a month without a mention of bats, balls or gloves.

-- Wire-service headline Monday: ``A-Rod Unhappy How WBC Decision Was Handled.'' If I've said it before, I'll say it again: The World Baseball Classic will bring a daily barrage of controversy until the tournament begins March 3. And the competition itself will be well worth the trouble.

-- Avoid the malls this morning, or get run over by people returning Presidents Day gifts.