John Updike, Golfer

The caddie's tip, indeed, approaching as inexorably as one's own death, and sooner, becomes a ruinous preoccupation. I have never had a caddie over 14 years of age who did not look disgruntled when he was paid. Under 14, they are still financially innocent and grateful for anything green. But in Ireland once, after a round in a gale that mixed snow with a driving rain, I saw a pack of snarling caddies rebel and attack the leader of our golf tour, who stuck to his proposed gratuity at the risk of his life. The caddies in Scotland and Ireland are not preambling their careers; this is their career; pursued day after plodding day under a dark cloud of Celtic stoicism and alcoholic vapors. Nevertheless, an ancient wisdom lurks in those crinkly eyes that have smilingly watched so many visiting Yank and Japanese foursomes come to grief in the venerable bunkers and grassy dunes. All an American caddie's eyes hold is the glaze of a childhood spent staring at television. At first, he gives you an 8-iron for 150 yards, as if you are Fred Couples; by the end of the round, he is handing you a 3-iron and telling you to punch it. Until my knees buckle I will carry my bag; golf is one misery that doesn't necessarily love company.

THIS CROWDED LIFE
November 1990

The truth is, I wish golf were half as popular, the way it was when I took up the game 30-odd years ago. For in those decades, in the area where I live north of Boston, the number of public golf courses has increased not at all, and courses that used to be a breeze to play have become simply hellish.

I was lucky enough to have been allowed to join, before the boom became quite so thunderous, a private club. It had been a relaxed sort of place -- a shaggy old layout where Willie Anderson had won an Open or two when Teddy Roosevelt was president (of the United States, not the club). You could walk the 18 without seeing more than two or three houses peeking in at the edges, and scarcely more than that number of other golfing groups. The same guy who cut the lawn in front of the veranda was the greenkeeper, and the sun and the chinch bugs were pretty much allowed to have their way with the verdure, and the underground pipes installed in the days of Bobby Jones had become pure ferric oxide, but, on balance, who terribly cared? On a balmy summer day, there was still nothing in the world to come between you and par except your own ineptitude. Golf's gift to the spirit is space, and the space in this case was organically designed and blessedly, blissfully underpopulated.

Alas, progress has found us out. The old course is a treasure, and the secret is out. Golf is booming, and yet something has gone from the game, something of naturalness and ease.

Golf used to be kind of a breather, and it has become more and more hard-breathing.

THE GIMME GAME
March 1996

I confess that I have gotten so caught up in the gimme game that, rather than risk missing a four-footer, I have asked my partner to putt out so that I could slap my now-meaningless putt triumphantly away. I have even inwardly prayed that my opponent sink his long putt so that the testing one in front of me would no longer matter. I want my putts not to matter becomes the bottom line, and if this isn't the formula for golf gutlessness and the crunch-time yips, then Jack Nicklaus never won a major.

DECEMBER GOLF
December 1989

December always holds some mild-enough days. The foursome, thinned perhaps to a mere threesome or twosome, meets by the boarded-up clubhouse, exhilarated to have an entire golf course to itself. There are no tee markers, no starting times, no scorecards, no gasoline carts -- just golf-mad men, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet. The season's handicap computer has been disconnected, so the sole spur to good play is rudimentary human competition -- a simple best-ball nassau or 50-cent game of skins, its running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group. You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating 15th-century Scotland.

The last swing feels effortless, and the ball vanishes dead ahead, gray lost in gray, right where the 18th flag would be. The secret of golf has been found at last, after eight months of futilely chasing it. Now, the trick is to hold it in mind, all the indoor months ahead, without its melting away.