More questions than answers this week, so I'll need your help in the comments section below, and by e-mail, to sort things out.

I was in Amarillo, Texas, last week watching people punch each other in the face for money, and as I stood by the ringside gurney and the waiting EMTs I got to thinking about the nature of risk and how we calculate it.

On the long undercard that night the price for risking a broken nose -- or the simple embarrassment of losing -- was about $150 in prize money. The folks climbing into that ring had made their calculations and determined that $150 -- and the chance to be a winner -- was fair value for their time, and for the risks they took. (And I'll specify here that I'm using "risk" to mean a state of uncertainty in which good, bad and even disastrous outcomes are known to exist.) So in a controlled circumstance, with weight classes and rules and a referee and a medical team, and even after a $30 co-pay to have your nose reset, you'd still be ahead 120 bucks for the night. If you were willing to take that risk.

This, the notion of risk and reward, lies at the very heart of sports. It is one of the things we love most about them, and one of the things we savor most richly in them. What's at stake? To whom? And what are these athletes willing to risk for it?

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Chip Beck's choice back in 1993 has been dubbed by some the Layup Heard 'Round The World.

Simple. And yet infinitely complex.

Here's a classic example. Chip Beck at the 1993 Masters. Down three strokes on Sunday afternoon to Bernhard Langer, Beck walks up to his second shot on the par-5 15th. He's got 236 yards into a light breeze to carry the pond that fronts the green.

Three years before the release of the movie "Tin Cup," he makes what he calculates to be the smart(er) choice. He pulls out a 5-iron and lays up to play for birdie.

But then he chunks his wedge, misses the green entirely and makes par. Finishes second.

To him, playing, the very real risk of a ball in the water was greater than the longshot reward of an eagle. To me, watching, 3-wood across the water was the "better," if not strictly "smarter," play. Which is of course ridiculous, because I had nothing at stake.

Even if he makes 3, there's still no guarantee he wins the thing. And "never up, never in!" is easy enough to shout from the sofa or murmur in the press box.

While I learned a little that day about Chip Beck, I learned a lot more about myself. In that small Augusta theater of pressurized uncertainty, I saw plainly and in sharp relief that without taking greater risks -- none of which was apt to land me on a gurney -- I was unlikely to earn the greater life rewards I then sought. Not long after, with a 236-yard approach into the wind very much on my mind, I made some changes in my life that persist to this day and have made me very happy. So I send Chip Beck my belated thanks for the lesson.

The world is full of risks, both calculated and uncalculated, for all of us at all times. We love risk and we hate it. (Somehow, success means less without the threat of failure, even if failure is a human constant, our default setting.) And having spent 10,000 years engineering as much actual risk out of our daily lives as we can, it is the foundation upon which we now build the managed risks of our racetracks and amusement parks and casinos and stock exchanges. Risk is inescapable. Nor do we wish to escape it. Because without risk-taking, we'd still be a little tribe of subsistence farmers in the breadbasket of Mesopotamia.

But just one short step back allows us to consider the terrifying randomness of it all.

We take, routinely, grave risks that cost us nothing.

At other times we risk little but lose everything.

That's how the sad story of Natasha Richardson struck me the day after I got home from Texas. Doing what hundreds of thousands of people do safely week in and week out, she was killed.

A few mornings before that, Mario Reyes took an acceptable, everyday risk by stepping off a curb in Miami on his way home from work -- only to be killed by a car driven by a man alleged to have taken a terrible and unacceptable risk: Donte Stallworth.

Wall Street caved in under the corrupt weight of what the president called last week "a culture where people made enormous sums of money taking irresponsible risks that have now put the entire economy at risk." The risks they took erased the savings of people who didn't know they were taking any risks at all. All in an economy already reeling from folks who thought it prudent to risk buying houses they couldn't afford from bankers who thought it worth the risk to lend them the money to do so. The whole collapse then theatrically compounded by criminal risk-taker Bernie Madoff -- and his clients, who couldn't risk passing up something too good to be true.

We are a proud nation of cowboys, high-flyers and adrenaline junkies, of explorers, astronauts, thimble-riggers, confidence men and snake-oil salesman. It is one of the things that make us great. And through it and across it all runs a bright, electric line -- from business to politics to romance to sex to sports; from steroids in baseball to point-shaving in basketball to the death of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona: risk.

Lay up? Or hit 3-wood? Go for it on fourth-and-four? Is it safe to cross? Can I beat that red light? How long can my family last without health insurance? What are the stats on injury by bathtub/lightning/jetliner/car? What are my chances? What are the odds? Which cigarette, which beer, which burger, which saxophone player or cocktail waitress is the one I shouldn't have had? The first or the last? Do I dare to eat a peach?

Life is the sum of the thousands of shifting risks we take every day.

But how do you do the calculus?

Hidden among those decisions is some madhouse attribute of humanity that lies beyond our calculation; some primal component of yes/no risk assessment and idiot intuition deep inside us, waiting in the dark beyond the reach of psychologists or sociologists or religion or science; the animal in the brain stem, vestigial, beyond caution or logic or fear, beyond our own understanding.

Which risks do we choose? Why take them? Is it bravery? Or is it insanity? Is it the best in our nature? Or the worst?

We look across the abyss. And still we leap.

Thinking, who can save us now?

Jeff MacGregor is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. You can e-mail him at jeff_macgregor@hotmail.com.