Just spent another day in the HWW archive pouring through his papers for a project I'm working on. He had some interesting things to say about his education at Jesus College, Cambridge. In the spring of 1938 he wrote a long, rambling piece for the "Brockton Daily Evening Enterprise" newspaper, called "Life at Cambridge University Described by Brockton Boy." There he describes his days at school, his friends, and talks a lot about drinking coffee, intramural sports (rugby), listening to music, seeing movies (HWW saw every movie ever made, it seems, and wrote about it for years), and two of the courses he took, "Theoretical Criticism from Aristotle to Johnston" (Prof. Lucas) and "The English Moralists" (Prof. Willey).
Nary a word about golf, except a reference to playing at "the Mildenhall course, 22 miles away." No indication of any organized golf, nor a Presidents Putter. Maybe that came in his second year, but I have yet to read of that. And no mention yet of influential professors, mentors or Bernard Darwin.
Interestingly, when he returned from Cambridge and came back to Brockton in 1939, he was basically without work and despaired of ever finding himself. He landed a weekly column in the Brockton paper called "The Light Arts" that could not have paid much but was fascinating for its two-year run, 850-1,100 words each, in which he ranges all over the place like an intellectual gadfly social critic, movie and book reviewer, music writer, sports commentator. Column first ran Oct. 5, 1939 and included a long-trip to South America in 1941 where he wrote a travelogue from Argentina and Brazil that subsequently formed the basis of his first (unpublished) book. That's also when he published his first piece in "The New Yorker," a small poem-like item in May 3, 1941 that winds up (surprise!) being about golf.