Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  One might wonder if the common philosophical wealth that Massachusetts inherits hasn’t sapped our lust for victory. A relative few native golfers have excelled at the national level. There was Ouimet and his epic feat in 1913, but in modern annals the non-sportswriter is hard pressed to come up with names beyond those of Paul Harney, Bob Toski, and Pat Bradley. Toski rapidly won six tournaments in 1953–54, and then slumped into a distinguished career as a golf instructor. Little Rhode Island and Connecticut have done slightly better, producing Julius Boros, Brad Faxon, and Ken Green. The climate can be blamed, but is it much worse than that of western Pennsylvania, which produced Arnold Palmer, or of Rochester, New York, whence came Walter Hagen? It is certainly better for golf than Sweden, but look at Jesper Parnevik and Annika Sörenstam. Compared with, say, bleak and windy Texas, with its parade of greats from Byron Nelson to Ben Hogan to Lee Trevino and Ben Crenshaw and beyond, Massachusetts has kept its golf to itself, a green secret tucked here and there among its spired towns and bravely surviving farms. I like it that way. I never feel closer to my adopted state than when I am perambulating those green spaces, searching for the philosopher’s stone behind a sweet, repeatable swing while casting a sideways glance at the early-budding willows and late-budding oaks, the swampy groves with their mossy stumps and springtime skunk cabbage, the wooden-bridged rivulets, the shimmering high rough of summer, and autumn’s blazing fringe of hickories and maples all along the fairway.

  1During this sermon there can be some by-play in the congregation: sleepers woken by ushers with sticks, etc.

  THE GAME

  In Love with a Wanton

  Written for The Talk of the Town, July 31, 2000.

  I FELL IN LOVE with golf when I was twenty-five. It would have been a healthier relationship had it been an adolescent romance or, better yet, a childhood crush. Though I’d like to think we’ve had a lot of laughs together, and even some lyrical moments, I have never felt quite adequate to her demands, and the bitch has secrets she keeps from me. More secrets than I can keep track of; when I’ve found out one, another one comes out, and then three more, and by this time I’ve forgotten what the first one was. They are sexy little secrets that flitter around my body—a twitch of the left hip, a pronation of the right wrist, a cock of the head one way, a turn of the shoulders to the other—and they torment me like fire ants in my togs; I can’t get them out of my mind, or quite wrap my mind around them. Sometimes I wish she and I had never met. She leads me on, but deep down I suspect—this is my secret—that I’m just not her type.

  Who is her type? Well, go figure. Fat guys like Craig Stadler and Tim Herron, and skinny wispy guys like Corey Pavin, and lanky skinny guys like Tiger Woods, and grim intense guys like Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan, and laid-back jokers like Fuzzy Zoeller and Walter Hagen and Lee Trevino. Golf isn’t exactly choosy, you’d have to say, but she can turn a cold shoulder to anybody on a given date. If there’s one kind of suitor she consistently rejects it’s the jittery, overanxious kind, worryworts who for all their lessons and driving-range prowess whiff on the first tee and stub a crucial three-foot putt on the eighteenth green. Golf likes a bit of sangfroid, the “What, me worry?” slouch, and spurns those who care too much and try too hard. I’ve tried not caring, but maybe I’ve tried too hard. She’s an intuitive old girl; she sniffs you out. Those extra ten yards you think you can squeeze out of your swing—she’s on to you while the club is still approaching horizontal. She likes guys (gals, too—she’s through with gender hang-ups) who keep things simple and don’t mind repeating themselves. And that, it breaks my heart to have at last perceived, lets me out.

  So: why do I still love her? Why do I continue to pour hours and treasure into a futile and unreciprocated courtship? Well, she’s awfully pretty. All those green curves, and dewy swales, and snug little sand traps; and the way she grassily stretches here and there and then some. She makes you think big, and lifts your head up to face the sky. When you connect, it’s the whistle of a quail, it’s the soar of a hawk, it’s the sighting of a planet hitherto unseen; it’s mathematical perfection wrested from a half-buried lie; it’s absolute. And golf never lets you go a whole round without your connecting once or twice. You think she’s turned her back on you forever, but with a little smile over her nicely mowed shoulder she lets a long putt rattle in, or a chip settle up close, or a 7-iron take a lucky kick off a greenside mound. Another foot to the right, and … Oh, she is quite the tease.

  And quite the accountant, too. How can you not love a game where a three-hundred-yard drive and a two-inch putt each count the same? I mean, that’s a sport with a sense of proportion. And the shapely rhythmic way a round dwindles down, hole after hole, far and then closer, and closer yet, and in. It’s a journey ending in a burial and—whoa!—up out of the grave again, eighteen times in all, twice a cat’s number of lives. In other games, somebody else is always getting in your way, all elbows and trash talk, brushing you back from the plate, serving to your backhand, giving you aggravation. Golf lets you do the aggravation all by yourself: there is nothing between you and the hole but what you’ve managed to put there. She’s no flatterer, but she can give a sucker an occasional break: a scuffed drive, a skulled approach, and a putt that would have rolled ten feet past still make a par-3 on the scorecard.

  The tools—is it too intimate to talk about the tools, the tender way the leather grips invite the fingers to curl around them and adhere, the grainy grooved faces of the irons, the slither of a club being withdrawn from the bag, the flexing elegance of the tapered shafts, even the merry dimples on the ball and the tiny sensation of “give” when the wooden tee penetrates the turf? Golf has the equipment to please a man, and she’s not ashamed to use it. She’s been around since the Scots monarchs were stymieing the English and Old Tom Morris would spend a drizzly afternoon stuffing a single feathery with duck down; but you’re as young as you feel, and my sweetheart still runs me ragged. And ragged, she keeps letting me know, isn’t good enough. We’d break up in a flash, except we never really got together.

  Playing with Better Players

  Contribution to The Ultimate Golf Book, edited by Charles McGrath and David McCormick (2002).

  UNHAPPY GOLFERS are each unhappy in their own way, but it is not true, as Tolstoy’s well-known formulation would have it, that all happy golfers are alike. Some, as we see on television, have flowing, picture-book swings, and others, especially among the seniors, swat at the ball, after short and choppy backswings. Arnold Palmer leaves his club out in front of him like a rifle, Lee Trevino seems to be trying to slap his drive through the right side of the infield, and Jim Furyk resembles, a commentator has said, an octopus falling out of a tree. But all seem to get the job done, or did get it done in their prime, and the mystery of how lingers somewhere out of the range of TV cameras. A viewer basically sees the ball vanish off the right of the screen like a banana slice and hears the commentator excitedly bleat that the shot is bending in, on top of the flagstick.

  No, being there in three dimensions is the only way to see for yourself, and for that reason a mediocre golfer needs now and then to play with better golfers. They show up in club tournaments or as the brother-in-law of a weekly partner; they can be college students or company salesmen or vagabond scions of a snake-oil fortune. Their togs are color-coördinated, the pockets of their bags bulge with towels, rainsuits, and spare gloves. As they take practice swings on the first tee, the swish of their clubs has a higher pitch than you hear in your usual, companionably inept foursome. Without seeming to strain, they generate clubhead speed where it counts, at the bottom of the swing, where the ball is. Doesn’t everybody? No: the virtually universal tendency of duffers is to hit from the top, expending wrist-cock in the first ninety degrees of the arc and thus arriving at the ball late and weak, giving it an armsy, decelerating hit that makes the fingers tingle and digs a deadening divot on the wrong side of the ball. With that little white orb sitting up on tee or turf begging to be spank
ed, our lunging into the downswing as swiftly and passionately as possible makes good sense to the warrior within us—Look out! The other fellow has a broadsword, too!!—but couldn’t be more counterproductive. The good player waits that heartbeat for the club to swing itself. His grip shows no white knuckles; the club adheres to him of its own sweet will. Swish, swish: a new beast has been released, there on the first tee.

  Watching your accustomed friends set up, waggle, and attack the ball, you are conscious of their bodies as a collection of separate units struggling to get together. The arms go back as far as they conveniently can, and then fear of failure, of generating insufficient distance, pushes them up some more inches, tipping the shoulders into a reverse pivot and making the feet fight like Tinker Bell’s to keep contact with the earth. The knees gyrate in agitation and the head bobs as if signalling assent to the hopelessness of it all. First the right leg locks straight as a stick, and then the left. It is all too much activity to squeeze into two seconds. The ordinary swing encompasses a roughly circular area full of muscular yearnings; propelled by such a rich mix of motions, the clubhead is lucky to graze the top of the ball or to get an open toe on a couple of dimples.

  The better golfer, contrariwise, seems to have only a waist, which twists slightly one way, to square his shoulders at a right angle to the flight line, and then the other way, to send the club into the ball and way beyond, so that the shaft winds up behind his back. That is what you miss on television, the quick way the center of the body—the waist and hips—slings the arms, as passive spokes, through the swing’s wide arc. The happy player gives the impression of big muscles used sparingly; the unhappy use all their little muscles, including those for pursing the lips and grinding the teeth, in order to propel a ball impossibly small and obdurate along a line as narrow and scary as a tightrope. The integrated, waisty (not wristy) swing makes the ball harder to miss; a simple coiling and uncoiling sweep it away, to distances we have trouble believing. Once I marvelled at where a diminutive veteran had put his 4-iron, way past my drive, and he bristled as if I were accusing him of cheating. As indeed, in a way, I was: it’s cheating to make golf look that easy.

  There is also a look the good players have of rolling the shoulders—for us lesser players the shoulders are a kind of seesaw, clenched and angular, whereas for our betters the suggestion is more of a tilted roundabout softly surging through a half-circle. Sam Snead exemplified this look, a kind of pantherish padded motion around his Panama-hat brim, as casually smooth as stepping onto an escalator. A fellow-student of the game once came back from watching a professional tournament with the wide-eyed revelation that the pros, seen up close, aren’t really swinging easy; their hands are a blur. A blur, I think, the way the end of a whip is a blur; the big body parts move the unresisting arms and loose, light hands through the hitting area before we know it. There is an enviable way in which a well-struck ball, in the moment of impact, seems already to be halfway there.

  Good players chase after the ball with the clubhead. The rest of us tend to hit and quit. The difference may not be apparent, but the ball feels the difference, and quits on us in turn. Also, good players on the green express, with their springy steps and earnest squats and squints, a certain expectancy of making the putt, though it be a downhill fifty-footer. Their faith is sometimes rewarded, certainly more often than our lack of faith, with its woefully short, absentminded lags and, in compensation, nervously jabbed six-footers, which rim the cup and end up a bit more than a gimme away. Good players expect, too, to get up and down, from a sand trap and elsewhere close, while we mentally chalk up three shots—the short approach and two putts.

  Finally, good players are pleasant to play with as well as instructive. Snug within their low-handicap comfort zone, they maintain a cheerful temper, never condescend to a sputtering duffer, demonstrate a scrupulous but unlawyerly regard for the rules, and rarely lose a golf ball. Only when one of them pounds a 3-wood right through the first part of a dogleg do they oblige their companions to visit with them the woods, brambles, swamp, or gorse.

  Good golfers show what golf can and should be. Nevertheless, they lack one lovely quality that your wristy, reverse-pivoting, heads-up, where-did-it-go buddies in the regular Wednesday foursome ever so delightfully possess: you can beat them.

  Walking Insomnia

  Written for Golf Digest, March 2001.

  TIGER WOODS, after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, slumped and sighed as if he’d been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. His suddenly weary demeanor reminded me of a curious physiological phenomenon: one is rarely tired while playing golf. Afterward, yes, and beforehand, very possibly, but while the score is mounting and the tees and fairways and greens are passing underfoot, fatigue is magically held at bay. I have flown overnight to London, taken the morning commuter plane from Heathrow up to Edinburgh, and driven several hours through a winding chain of Scots villages to a golf course, delirious with jet lag. But once I stepped with my group of groggy Yanks onto the springy turf of the first tee, a rejuvenating exhilaration set in, dissipating fatigue as does the sun the mists of morning. We frisked around like a pack of schoolboys, and only after the eighteenth hole, in the creaking leather armchairs of the clubhouse bar, partaking of lulling liquors, did we feel our years again.

  And in this country, too, the aftereffects of a short night’s sleep and a premature arising are suspended during play. How can this be? The answer can only be that golf is so entertaining and various in its challenges that the mortal frame is wholly engaged; weariness finds no cranny whereby to enter. Think of an average par-4 as a duffer plays it. First, the perilous, all-important drive, which can evade any fairway no matter how wide and can be sliced, hooked, or topped into any patch of rough no matter how out of the way. Then, once the wee orb has been maneuvered with one blow or many to within, say, 150 yards of the green, there is the iron shot, demanding not the drive’s sweeping motion but a sharper, more simultaneously upright and downward swing, ideally culminating in a smart divot and a soaring straight shot. If ideality does not become reality, a chip of some length is left, requiring crisp contact and a judiciously partial swing. Then, if the chip is not skulled across the green, or chunked into more short rough, or shanked sideways into a sand trap, there remain, most likely, two putts—the long putt, requiring a slippery mental image of lagged distance and estimated break on the swales and humps of the green, and the short putt, a testing little snake with its own fangs of dire possibility.

  At every point on this progression the mind is challenged by fresh problems; it is as if a sculptor were to move around his studio carving first in granite, then in soapstone, then in tight-grained wood, in friable plaster, and finally in butter. Each substance demands its own technique, its own backlog of previous experience and helpful admonitions to oneself. Don’t overswing. Don’t hurry from the top. Turn your back. Keep the triangle of the arms and chest. Don’t grip too tight. Don’t baby it. Pick your spot, and trust it. Get it up to the hole. Don’t overread the break, or underread it. Each touch of the club on the ball is a test, and a chance for redemption. A good iron can redeem a mediocre drive. A good chip can redeem a poor iron. A good putt can redeem a bad chip. There is hope at every juncture, until the ball rattles into the cup and sends us on to the next tee, where fresh hope springs up as readily as dandelions in April.

  Oh, to be sure, other sports have their variety, too. In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash, and the drop volley, each with a different grip. Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a batter’s and a fielder’s. Still, only golf sets up its challenges in such a tidy row, a telescoping succession like that of Russian dolls nested one inside another. There is space between each shot, providing time in which to contemplate and conceptualize. The classic and best way to play is to walk, coming up on the ball from behind with a firm and thoughtful tread, rather than zigzagging at it with a cart partner’s chatter in your ears and his ball cluttering your
view. Connecting the dots is the method of golf’s puzzle, the prize going to the fewest connections. The course is a diagram in your head, and you are the dot, moving along in as straight a line as you can manage.

  If the course is one you play often, you have hit most of the possible shots well enough at some time or other, and one of the stimuli keeping you awake is this rivalry with your best self. Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. Your brain pours a rain of advice down upon your body, like a seasoned old coach who is at first patient and fatherly with a dull-witted athlete, then louder and blunter in his sideline advice, and finally livid with frustration. Who could sleep in such a racket of inward stricture?

  And always the next shot lures us on, making the heart race with hope, even though the ball be found in the rough beneath a tangle of running raspberries, or in the woods behind an arched beech root, or in the sand nested within its own concussion crater. But recovery is not utterly impossible; the green is but 120 yards away; a deliberate slice might well curve into the hand’s-breadth of space between two stout trunks. So: keep the head down and the hands ahead of the clubhead. Pow! The ball vanishes—no, there it is, skipping along on the cart path, taking a fortunate kick right off the trap rake, dribbling onto the green, settling close to the hole, from here it looks like a gimme. Your buddies cheer. Another addition is made to the sparse annals of your wonderful shots.