Golf, Illuminated by a 20th Century Master

The critic Ted Gioia recently posted a Substack called Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased? He noted that among those being forgotten are literary giants like John Cheever and Saul Bellow; musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker; and movies like Citizen Kane. John Updike not long ago was one of America’s most prominent living writers, yet reading him today would be, in Gioia’s words, “an act of rebellion.”

Call me a wild-eyed revolutionary, because I’ve just finished a book of Updike’s essays, Golf Dreams. I’ve been reading his novels since I was a teenager, starting with The Centaur, moving on to Rabbit, Run (which I was too young to understand), and over the decades getting to most of the others (Rabbit Is Rich is my favorite). Updike could write anything — novels, stories, poetry, essays — and bring to it his gift for the exquisite image and the revealing metaphor, as well as his insight into human psychology.

It was no surprise to me then that his golf writing, besides the beautiful prose, illuminates in new ways what we players love about the game. I’ve read passages aloud to my wife, in hopes she’ll understand. While you don’t have to be a golfer to appreciate Golf Dreams, if you are one, I recommend buying a copy.

The Camaraderie

Golf is an oasis of good fellowship in our too-often loutish society. I’ve said before that the same guy who would flip you off in traffic transforms on the putting green into a 17^th century French courtier, all “after you”s and “excuse me”s.

Updike writes,

A playing companion of any sex, religion, or place of national origin becomes a dear friend, caught up with us in this captivating travail. However little compatible they appear off the course, we love our fellow golfers as we tilt, sway, and crumble toward the nineteenth hole.

I’ve found this to be unfailingly true, one exception being on a public course in a red swath of Long Island, when my assigned partners learned I was a New Yorker and began Trumpsplaining what a “hellhole” it had become. (Neither had visited it for years, by the way.) They bet I “voted for Jerry Nadler.” I said no, I voted on the Island, where I own a house in a purple district. “Wait a minute,” one said, “you live in the city and vote out here? How many times do you vote, anyway?” I said, “I vote eleven times, like all Democrats.” There, I’d given them a story to tell their friends.

Updike:

The trend of golfing rules and custom … is toward elaborate niceness; we repress our coughs while others are swinging, we join in the hopeless hunt for another’s lost ball, and on the green we avoid stepping on another’s putting lines in a veritable Morris dance of exaggerated courtesy. Our behavior, ideally, is better than elsewhere, because we are happier here than elsewhere.

There’s something delightfully low pressure about a relationship which, constrained by pace of play, must last no more than 4-1/2 hours. You start off with chit-chat — anodyne queries about work and children, finding people you know in common, restaurants you like, and by Hole 3 the focus is 90% on the golf. These brief encounters can blossom into friendships, and I’ve struck up a few good new ones on the links. Making friends later in life, I’ve found, is not so easy to do.

Updike:

My golfing companions, whose growing numbers now include a number of the dead, are more dear to me than I can unembarrassedly say. Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

I rate this true: even with the MAGA Long Island golfers who tortured me for a few holes, by the 18^th we were lifting our caps and shaking hands genially.

The Journey

Many decades ago, a correspondent wrote to the owner of a mail-order shop, Doctor Golf, “I am in my 65^th year and I have been seized by golf like a mouse in the claws of a golden eagle.” Doctor Golf congratulated him:

Only after the fetters of youth have been flung aside can golf enter. Only then can the man know the folly of his adolescent belief of the swing answering to the man and perceive the joy and the truth of the complete man answering to the swing. And … the even greater joy is realized when he stands in the bright sunlight of complete fulfillment and comes to realize that the swing is the man.

I’m also a 65-year-old mouse in the golden eagle’s claws and also have discovered that golf can’t be learned quickly, especially when taken up in mid-life. It’s a journey, requiring Zen-like patience.

Updike writes,

Golf … must be learned afresh each time we tee off, and if on the one hand it humbles us with a sudden collapse of some aspect of play we thought had been mastered, it on the other always holds out, perhaps even more to the inept than to the expert, the hope of dramatic improvement.

Speaking on behalf of the inept, I can confirm that it’s that one well-struck shot, often granted cruelly by the golf gods on the last hole, that imprints on the brain the message, “You can do this.” As in the long second act of a solid screenplay, the protagonist’s glimpses of success are followed by deflating reversals, yet he pulls himself together and presses on. Golf is a game for the optimistic, the stubborn, or the maniacally driven.¹

I remember when I was first learning to play, on a 9-hole near my house, a man I was paired with said the unsayable on a golf course: “You should just give up.” His faux pas puts me in mind of a cocktail party I attended in 1994 after launching Firebird, when one of George Soros’ associates gave me the stink eye and said, “Russia’s not going to make it.” Nothing gets me more determined to achieve a goal than some jerk telling me I can’t do it. (I can’t wait to prove the Soros guy wrong, you know, someday.)

The Beauty and Bliss

Arnold Haultain, in 1908’s The Mystery of Golf, quoted by Updike, captures the beauty of a humble course, never mind a Pebble Beach or Augusta:

[H]ills, valleys, trees, a gleaming lake in the distance … the whiffs of air — pungent, penetrating — that come through green things growing, the hot smell of pines at noon, the wet smell of fallen leaves in autumn … the lungs full of oxygen, the sense of freedom on a great expanse, the exhilaration, the vastness, the buoyancy, the exaltation …. And how beautiful the vacated links at dawn, when the dew gleams untrodden beneath the pendant flags and the long shadows lie quiet on the green ….

Everyone knows the description of golf as a “good walk spoiled,” but this facile phrase misses its deeper attraction for humans — I must say it, male humans usually.

Updike again:

[T]he arrowing nature of the attempt answers to ancient hunting instincts, and the great green spaces of a golf course remember the landscape in which the human animal found his soul. … Our mazy progress through the eighteen is a trek such as prehistoric man could understand, and the fact that the trek is fatiguingly long constitutes part of its primitive rightness.

Why wouldn’t such a “hunt,” in which the main risks today lie not in being attacked by a beast but being struck by an errant tee shot or bitten by a tick, addict men who otherwise spend their lives riding not horses but desk chairs and living room couches?

Aficionados will go to great lengths to get in a round, as if driven by an imperative beyond merely “having fun.” This isn’t pickleball, an affirming sport for geriatrics, but one of continual struggle which, for that reason, offers a path to self-actualization. It must be done, and at regular intervals. This raises a final question, one Updike was asked by a woman at a dinner party: Is life too short for golf?

He writes:

As soon say life is too short for sleep as say it is too short for golf. As with dreaming, we enter another realm, and emerge refreshed. … For the hours and days it has taken from me, golf has given me back another self, my golfing self, who faithfully awaits for me on the first tee when I have put aside the personalities of breadwinner and lover, father and son. Golf lengthens life, I should have told that young lady.

1. Updike details the forms of these reversals. “[P]eaks of pure poetry leaping up from abysses of sheer humiliation — the fat shot that sputters forward under the shadow of its divot, the thin shot that skims across the green like a maimed bird, the smothered hook which finds the raspberry patch, the soaring slice that crosses the highway, the chunked chip, the shanked approach, the water ball, the swamp ball, the deeper-into-the woods ricochet, the trap-to-trap blast, the total whiff on the first tee, the double-hit putt from two feet out. Here was a rich sport indeed.”

And yet, “Four golfers of variable talent, over the course of eighteen holes, will each manage to win the momentary applause of the others.”