by John Updike
Even in the depths of a dismal round the possibility of a miracle lingers. Despair relaxes the swing, and things look paradoxically up. Many a long putt wanders in for a nice quadruple bogey. Many a soaring wedge caps a succession of tense foozles. The possibilities are always there, and keep our energy high. There is never a juncture where the adrenaline can stop flowing. And who could be bored or long disconsolate amid the spreading scenery that unfolds around us, the heedless wildlife that twitches at the edges of our journey, the silvery clouds that cap it? Who could be tired with so much to think about, so much to hope for, so much to laugh about, so much to redeem? Space brims all around us, and vaster yet is our room for improvement. I have, I confess, sometimes wondered how some of my more retired friends can play golf every day without any sign of surfeit. Well, the man is the same, and the course is the same, but the golf is never the same, and those wide-awake synapses just keep firing.
Lost Balls
Foreword to a book of golf photographs by Charles Lindsay (2005).
And the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”
—T. S. Eliot, chorus from The Rock
I HAVE SEEN news videos of outfielders rummaging for a baseball lost in the ivy on the quaintly leafy wall at Wrigley Field, and I have experienced mis-hit tennis balls flying over the court fence deep into an impenetrable grove beyond, but no sport offers the sensation of lostness as often and enragingly as does golf. The damn thing has to be here, we think as we thrash at a clump of blueberry bushes or buffalo grass with the 7-iron we hopefully brought with us into the wilderness. Our obliging partners tramp in circles with us for a few minutes, peeking into drainage ditches and under fallen palm fronds, but their hearts aren’t in it the way ours are; this lost ball represents two strokes, and two extra strokes could mean the hole and even, it could be, the match, the entire outing, the day itself. Why me? one wonders. It was just a little slice, a tiny tail exaggerated by a gust of wind. It carried only a tad, a mere yard or two, into the woods, or the marsh, or the tall grass. Why couldn’t it have been the other fellow, the loudmouth buddy smugly announcing, “O.K., we’ve given it five minutes, let’s get a move on. It’s getting dark, guys”? Not as dark, actually, as the inner weather as one trudges along, dragging like the foursome’s crippled foot, “out of the hole,” as they say, headed for an ignominious triple bogey, a condescending, token “paper seven.”
The whereabouts of the ball are in a sense the key to every ball game, but the whereabouts are most picturesque in golf. Tangles of running raspberry, the shadowy depths of a deep sand bunker, the sandy beds of shallow little watercress-choked creeks, the weedy lees of lichen-laden stone walls, the snake-infested moonscapes of Precambrian basalt just off the plush watered fairways of a desert course, the pulpy flesh of a venerable saguaro cactus, the leaf-mulched floor of a hushed beech forest, the squishy tummocks of a reedy marsh, the hot and sere macadam of the club parking lot, the concrete curb next to the snack shop, the bed of petunias and pansies lifted up on creosoted railroad ties beside the eleventh tee—all these nasty patches of environment can play host to a misplayed golf ball. We have been there.
And others have been there before us. All but buried in the sun-dried mud of a bygone spring day, an ancient cut-up Acushnet glimmers to catch the golfer’s restless eye. Or perhaps, in a patch of low-lying, seldom-visited bog, a waffle-patterned gutta-percha antique comes to light, browned on its underside by its ages-long bath in the slow-acting acids of Mother Earth. For every lost ball, there was once a forlorn search, perfunctory or thorough; these questing ghosts haunt the course, hovering at the juncture of their interrupted game. “Found it!” one wants to cry out in triumph, though the loser has been decades in his grave. Golf thus leaves a residue, thin but detectable, on the hundreds of acres set aside for play. Not only lost golf balls but broken tees, detached cleats, withered gloves, and the occasional broken shaft, petulantly snapped in two, mingle their mournful testimony with the silent turf.
A player interacts with the landscape at a visceral level, his natural difficulties translating into rage and even tears. At times, analyzing the niceties of a “close lie,” he takes a worm’s-eye view of the ball as it nestles amid pebbles and tufts; at others, his eye soars like that of a lordly hawk, seeking the telltale glint of his ball in a wide, wind-whitened world of rough. Goose feathers and dandelion polls and balled-up Kleenexes cruelly tease him with optical illusions. Nature is his companion, but, like a nagging wife, she persistently points out his inadequacies and cloaks her scenic beauties in the ongoing quarrel of the game itself. We struggle to experience the course as something other than an enemy challenging and taunting us at every swing—to experience it instead as a site of seduction, of artful landscaping, of birdsong and wild berry and pale blossom and scarlet autumnal leaf, all tamed to our use in an enchanted blend of natural creation and human recreation. But a greenside bunker leaps up and pounces on a singing 9-iron and shatters our mood, narrowing our perspective to a square foot of damp sand.
The camera of Charles Lindsay knows how to see the game. It not only sees the variety of turf and the luxuriant obduracy of rough but it hears the plip of the sadly underclubbed approach as it sends out the ripples from its irrevocable submersion, and it smells the tonic freshness of morning dew and rising mist, and it feels the effort of a sand wedge digging deep to lift the ball over the trap’s hairy lip. From Ireland to Arizona and back his camera has journeyed to record golf’s sensations—the weave of interlocking incident that makes up a round. Some golf balls are lost, and with the things now retailing for twelve dollars a sleeve of three Pro V1s, this borders on tragedy. But some are found, right where we thought we had looked a half-dozen times before. Not only is it ours (a theatrical examination, sans touche, confirms it) but it is sitting up on a bed of pine needles. There is an opening back to the fairway. There is even a shot—a chancy shot, with a deliberate slice, cunningly controlled—at the green. So keep your head down and swing easy. Golf may not be a lost cause after all.
Being Senior
Written for the official program for the 2001 U.S. Senior Open Championship, held in June at the Salem Country Club in Peabody, Massachusetts.
I SEEM TO REMEMBER, from my hundreds of hours spent watching televised golf, a bulky senior pro (Gay Brewer? Charles Coody?) leaping up into the startled but smiling embrace of Sam Snead, who had just carried the two of them, with his ageless swing and sidewinder putting style, to a match-play victory. It was the kind of jocular moment we used to expect of the Seniors Tour, when the stakes were low enough and the I’ve-been-there factor was high enough to permit some foolery to squeak through. In the first decade, the 1980s, Chi Chi Rodríguez and then Lee Trevino brought their Latin levity into the winner’s circle, and nobody made a million dollars in a season. Trevino was the first, in 1990. Now two million is par, and the big money winners the last three years, Hale Irwin, Larry Nelson, and Bruce Fleisher, are amiable sportsmen but too intent to be comedians. The stakes have gone up, the field is keen, and you better make your killing before your fiftieth birthday has settled too deep into your bones.
The Senior PGA Tour, as it evolved, turned out not to be the regular tour transcribed up a decade or two in the age scale. It was dominated, in its early decades, by unspectacular regular-tour players like Don January and Miller Barber who proved insouciant and durable enough to thrive in the senior altitudes. On the other hand, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer failed to have Senior careers commensurate with their regular-tour achievements. Hale Irwin, who recently became the all-time Senior winner, now dominates, but at his heels there is a hungry pack of names we’ve never heard before—club pros and British/Aussie also-rans who find after half a century of ill-rewarded labor the opportunity to cash in. Success at the highest levels of golf is much a matter of intensity, and perhaps only so many decades of intensity are gi
ven to an athlete: burnout is a natural consequence of competitive fire. The man at last released from the thralldom of a pro shop, where his time is consumed with giving lessons and selling equipment to the relatively inept, may well come forth at fifty, his children’s educations secured and his mortgage at last paid off, ablaze with a pent-up will to dominate. Certainly the Senior Tour offers us a revised star system, featuring such unfamiliar names as Tom Wargo and Bruce Summerhays and Don Bies and John Bland and cigar-chomping Larry Laoretti and, indeed, top-ranking Bruce Fleisher, who won a single tournament on the regular PGA tour and whose best finish on the money list, in 1992, placed him sixty-eighth. A delayed dose of prowess seemed to kick in for these middle-aged men.
To those of us who never won more than a low flight in the club four-ball, senior status also holds out a chance of rewards. Retirement brings with it more time on the course and the practice range. Senior sagacity, honed in forty years of carving a living from a cruel world, can surely tame at last that youthful slice. The old body doesn’t seem so bad, if we tighten the belt a notch and remember to do those stretching exercises on the tee; its very stiffness may be the enforced path to a slowed tempo and a shorter backswing. Golf is 90 percent in the head, and a man is more and more head as he ages. Mind over matter at last. If all it takes for a solid hit is a fuller shoulder-turn and a lighter grip, why, here they are, delivered by the mature brain to the muscular system as faithfully as a Social Security check plopping through the letter slot. It’s a simple game, after all. And, with this new equipment, it virtually plays itself. Why, I can remember (you tell yourself) when a 3-wood was literally that, a little persimmon knob with a face no bigger than a quail egg, and the shaft was raw steel, with as little flex as a car jack. These new MegaMagnum Quadra Metals, and their matching scoopback krypton irons with annealed plastic insets, zing the ball virtually while they’re still in the bag; the laws of physics allow you no way to miss.
Yet somehow the old landmarks on the course seem to be receding like the top of the down escalator. The drive that used to reach the swale now hangs back on the flat: the bunker an 8-iron used to clear in a breeze has been expanded (drat those cocky young upstarts on the greens committee!) to swallow a 6. And yet you never struck a 6-iron more cleanly, with more seasoned know-how. Clearly there has been lots of fiddling with the course, under cover of night. The greens have been shaved to a glassy smoothness, so that an ideally hit chip nevertheless has no bite and slides off into the nasturtium bed at the base of the next tee. Whose fancy idea was it, anyway, to plant nasturtiums there?
The course seems a little stranger each day, though you bring to it ever more senior wisdom. At times, on the greens, while your senescent opponent hangs for three minutes over his sidehill two-footer, you forget where you are, let alone what the score is. A sliver of cloudiness, like a plastic insert, slides between your intention and the execution. On the fairway, as you step up to your shot, the key swing-tip slips from your consciousness and you hit with a blank pleading mind, like a hurt boxer waiting for the bell to ring. At times, even, the senior golfer is prey to wondering, while he sweats over a six-foot putt to salvage a double bogey, if it’s worth it, all this anxiety, suppressed rage, expense, and waste of hours to determine whether or not a little ball will slip into a hole. Such thoughts are heresy—look at how Tiger Woods winces, crumpling as if stabbed, when a putt slides by. But such irreverent doubts do enter the senior head, and make the old quest for perfection, like other instances of youthful ardor, seem a touch silly.
And yet the beauty of a well-struck shot and the happiness of being in nature continue to lure us outdoors. The great gap between a duffer’s skills and those of the senior professionals who are strutting their stuff at the Salem Country Club this week invites us to believe we might still, in spite of our deteriorating bodies and emptying heads, improve. The room for improvement is exhilaratingly large; we might, by the mellow light of the sunset years, whittle away at it, reducing the number of three-putts, fluffed chips, thinned approaches, pushed irons, and topped drives that have kept our handicap, these many years, so far above our true potential.
Handicap: how apt that word is! Every golfer is handicapped, and increasingly so, by aching joints, fuzzy vision, and diminished muscle tone. But diminishing expectations can bring with them a relaxing modesty. It is too late—too late!—for us to qualify for the Senior circuit, but in the tiny circuit of our equally aging golfing acquaintance, we can, with a little refreshed focus, still cut a swath, wreaking vengeance for past defeats and reaping a harvest of quarters and dollar bills in Skins or low-stakes Nassau. So on we seniors soldier, a vincible doughty army, ever hopeful, ever grateful for those moments of the game when a good or lucky shot allows us to forget our age.
Table Talk
THE END OF AUTHORSHIP: Words addressed to booksellers attending BookExpo America, in Washington, D.C., in May 2006.
Booksellers, you are the salt of the book world. You are on the front line where, while the author cowers in his opium den, you encounter—or “interface with,” as we say now—the rare and mysterious Americans who are willing to plunk down twenty-five dollars for a book. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. At my mother’s side I used to visit the two stores in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania, a city then of a hundred thousand, and I still recall their names and locations—the Book Mart, at Sixth Street and Court, and the Berkshire News, on Fifth Street, in front of the trolley stop that would take us home to Shillington.
When I went away to college, I marvelled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. In addition to the Coop and various outlets where impecunious students like myself could buy tattered volumes polluted by someone else’s underlinings and marginalia, there were bookstores that catered to the Cambridge bourgeoisie, the professoriate, and those elite students with money and reading time to spare. The Grolier, specializing in modern poetry, occupied a choice niche on Plympton Street, and over on Boylston there was the Mandrake, a more spacious sanctum for books of rare, pellucid, and modernist water. In the Mandrake—presided over by Irwin Rosen, a soft-voiced short man, with brushed-back graying hair—there were English books, Faber & Faber and Victor Gollancz, books with purely typographical jackets and cloth-covered boards warping from the damp of their transatlantic passage, and art books, too glossy and expensive even to glance into, and of course New Directions books, modest in format and delicious in their unread content.
After Harvard, I went to Oxford for a year, and browsed for dazed hours in the rambling treasury, on the street called the Broad, of Blackwell’s—shelves of Everyman’s and Oxford Classics, and the complete works, jacketed in baby-blue paper, of Thomas Aquinas, in Latin and English. Then I came to New York, when Fifth Avenue still seemed lined with bookstores—the baronial Scribner’s, with the central staircase and the scrolled ironwork of its balconies, and the Doubleday’s a few blocks on, with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.
Now I live in a villagelike corner of a small New England city that holds, mirabile dictu, an independent bookstore, one of the few surviving in the long coastal stretch between Marblehead and Newburyport. But I live, it seems, in a fool’s paradise. Last month, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article that gleefully envisioned the end of the bookseller, and indeed of the writer. Written by Kevin Kelly, identified as the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, the article describes a glorious digitalizing of all written knowledge. Google’s plan, announced in December 2004, to scan the contents of five major research libraries and make them searchable, according to Kelly, has resurrected the dream of the universal library. “The explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade,” he writes, “has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?”
Unlike the libraries of old, Kelly continues, “this library would
be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.” The anarchic nature of the true democracy emerges bit by bit. “Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page,” Kelly writes. “These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or ‘playlists,’ as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual ‘bookshelves’—a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these ‘bookshelves’ will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages.”
The economic repercussions of this paradise of freely flowing snippets are touched on with a beguiling offhandedness, as a matter of course, a matter of an inexorable Marxist unfolding. As the current economic model disappears, Kelly writes, the “basis of wealth” shifts to “relationships, links, connection and sharing.” Instead of selling copies of their work, writers and artists can make a living selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions—in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the ‘discovery tool’ that markets these other intangible valuables.”