John Updike - Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf

2012 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 1996 by John Updike

Drawings copyright 1996 by Paul Szep

Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

Cover photo: Palabra / Alamy

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1996.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt from Seaside Golf by John Betjeman from Collected Poems.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78412-4

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The very summer in which I at last, acting on an old suggestion of my genial publisher, settled to the task of collecting my scattered pieces about golf turned out to be an unhappy one for my game. I dont know what went wrong. Simple aging, could it have been? For a number of years I have been nagged by an article by Gary Player in which he emphatically stated that golfers as they age must learn to draw the ball. I have always been, alas, something of a fader. A high straight ball was the best I could do. But then I came upon a tip from one of the female pros on how to draw the ball: you face the club toward the center of the fairway but swing as if for the right edge. It worked well during a few vacation rounds in Florida, with only my wife as witness, but turned out to be, in the slowly thawing North, before less sympathetic witnesses, a recipe for disaster. I began to hit just the top fraction of the ball, producing eighty-yard worm-burners off the tee and fairway woods of maximum futility and inconvenience. The errancy spread to my whole bag: I was blading soft approaches clear across the green, hitting irons everywhere but on the sweet spot, and looking up even on putts. I had lost the ability to turn in scores that warranted my modest eighteen-handicap, and in my midnight despair I would jot down, like lists of old girlfriends many years married to some other guy, tips that had once worked for me, e.g.:

1. loose grip

2. right elbow close to body

3. back in one piece

4. swing slow

5. begin downswing with left heel

6. keep the wrist-cock

7. dont try to swish

8. dont look up

9. think schwooo

Even when my game wasnt totally ugly, it lacked the je ne sais quoi of yesteryear. The concluding hole at my home course is a pretty, shortish par-four which on my good days I played with a drive and then, say, a 7-iron that just floated over the deep transverse bunker in front of the green. I hit a good drivemy best of the dayand measured myself as ten yards inside the 150-yard marker. A soft wind stirred in my face and, to be sure to clear the bunker, I took a 5-iron, my club for the 150 distance. The fairway lie was sidehill, with the ball a bit above my feet; I caught it sweet, I thought. My playing partner said, while the black dot was in mid-air, heading dead at the pin, What a lovely shot! But, as he and I watched, instead of bouncing on the green, the ball continued its descent on down into the bunker. I was short. I couldnt hit a 5-iron a lousy 140 yards. Earlier this summer, I had been examined by a new doctor, my doctor of four decades having at last retired, though he was scarcely older than I. The new doctors nurse had me hop in my stocking feet on the scale to be weighed and measured. Five eleven and a half, she said and, seeing the look on my face, asked with polite concern, That sound right? All of my adult life I had been measured at six feet. No more, no less. My image of myself was that of a six-foot man who could hit a 5-iron 150 yards. In all dimensions, I was shrinking.

My love of golf had been of its generous measurementsits momentary amplification of myself within a realm larger than life. If my golf was to shrink, as I had seen it shrink for others, to a mingy, pokey business of arthritic shoulder-turns and low, hippitty-hopping drives that merely nibbled at the yardage, I would rather not tee up. Rereading these pieces, the oldest of them dating to 1958, has had, then, for me a bitter flavor of the valedictory. Beneath their comedy of complaints there ran always a bubbling undercurrent of hope, of a tomorrow when the skies would be utterly blue and the swing equally pure. But the it that Rabbit Angstrom discovers in the first of his matches described herein, the soaring grandeur that blooms of its own out of a good swing, now seemed one more youthful vision gone glimmering. My romance with golf stood revealed as hopeless. My arms were too long, my temperament too impatient, my sense of alignment too askew. From my golf dreams I had at last awoken.

As the summer dragged on, through what seemed an endless succession of obligatory matches, the suspicion crept over me that golf had stolen my life away: the hard gemlike flame with which I, as an artist, should have burned had been dampened if not doused by the green mists of this narcotic pastime. The fine edge that other penmen had dulled with whiskey and doses of Hollywood I had let rust into dullness while woolgathering over pronation and weight shift, wrist-cock and knee-bend. In the sluggish midst of a crowded member-guest tournament that had us waiting on nearly every shot, behind a foursome that putted with Solomonic deliberation, it occurred to me that, although I could not quite regret the timethe hours adding up to years of temps perduthat I had spent playing the game myself, I certainly did resent the time I had devoted to watching other men play. Their fussy preparations, their predictable expostulations, the somehow sheepish smugness with which they repeated a crookedly grooved swing and the exact same errors that had dogged their golf for decadeshow could I ever have thought this was a kind of paradise? Clearly, it was a hell faithfully answering Dantes description: circles of sinners frozen forever into an earned, ungainly agony. Perambulating these circles this hellish summer (in which there was never a dark cloud, a merciful rainout), I competitively met, now and then, men whose addiction had served to give them sound, repeating, victory-bent swings, and as they smilingly shellacked me and whatever partner I had incriminated in my criminal ineptitude I could take the measure of what price their excellence had extracted: total obsession, cruelly neglected wives and loved ones, business careers abandoned at the first opportunity, every non-golfing thought and consideration crowded to the parched margins of their cerebral cortices. I had balked at paying that price; I had betrayed golfs jealous god by trying to find fun and success elsewhere, by spreading my bets. And now I was suffering for it. So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth: Revelation 3:16, for advanced beginners.